to avoid her. She was not the first person to feel uncomfortable around her. A decade earlier, Melissa Strom was encountering Liz for the first time, and she, too, had experienced a prickling anxiety in her presence. While Amy had met Liz because of Dave, Melissa, too, had met Liz because of a man. But in Melissa’s case, Liz had been the ex—a very jealous ex, determined to get her man back. Amy, of course, didn’t want Dave back. “I just wanted him to be happy,” she stresses. But that didn’t seem to matter. Liz was convinced that Amy was her enemy. David Kroupa was the prize, just as Dirk Rhodes had been Liz’s prize a decade earlier.
If not for a memory lapse, Melissa would never have met Dirk. She wasn’t old and forgetful. She was a sharp twenty-two-year-old who worked as a pharmacy technician. On a March night in 2003, she and a friend went out to Omaha’s Pheasant Bar and Grill. It was not until the next morning that she realized her mistake. “I accidentally forgot to pay the tab, and they had my credit card!” She went back to the bar to pay her bill and retrieve her credit card. Lovely, with a trim figure and shiny blond hair that fell halfway down her back, she was accustomed to the stares of men, and she barely noticed Dirk seated at the bar, watching her.
As the bartender teased Melissa about her slipup with the bill, she chuckled along with him. “Dirk overheard me and the bartender joking about my forgetting to pay the tab, and he made a silly comment that made me laugh.” Melissa and Dirk began chatting. “I remember thinking that his hair was overly bleached, and I wasn’t sure if he was my type. But he had really nice blue eyes and a funny sense of humor.”
She said yes when Dirk asked her out, and soon they were seeing each other exclusively. Dirk worked at a prison, but his passion was art. He created amazing artwork and also wrote poems. Melissa was impressed and found herself drawn to his creativity. He was single, he assured her, but he had a child. That was fine with Melissa. She loved kids, and she didn’t mind helping him care for two-year-old Peter. The little boy was adorable, but Melissa was not prepared for Peter’s mother.
Dirk shared custody of Peter with Liz Golyar, but he knew her as Shanna. Their breakup was so new that they hadn’t yet hammered out the details. He explained to Melissa that he had broken up with his son’s mother because of her over-the-top jealousy. When he had met Shanna, she was a single mother of a little girl, Trina, about two years old. Shortly after he began dating Shanna, she got pregnant, and they had stayed together for the baby. After Peter was born, Shanna’s jealousy intensified, and she constantly accused Dirk of cheating on her when he had been nothing but loyal to her. He put up with it for as long as he could, but he felt suffocated by her possessiveness.
He met Melissa on the rebound, barely two weeks after he had moved out of Shanna’s place. He had not planned for his new girlfriend to meet his ex so soon, but Melissa was visiting him on one of his days with Peter when Shanna popped in. “Dirk was supposed to drop Peter off at her place,” Melissa explains. “That was the usual arrangement. But she had gotten the idea that Dirk was seeing somebody, and she showed up at the door.”
Shanna made no attempt to hide her displeasure when she saw Melissa. The angry mother marched into the apartment and scooped up her child. Dirk tried to make polite introductions, but Shanna was not interested in meeting his gorgeous new girlfriend. Shanna left abruptly.
Melissa couldn’t blame her. “The breakup was very, very fresh. I understood that Shanna was hurting.” But Melissa had not been the cause of the breakup, and Shanna’s hostile energy had left her shaken. “When Shanna got home, she called Dirk. He didn’t pick up, so Shanna left a message on his answering machine and said something like, ‘I’m not sure I’m comfortable sharing custody of Peter if she is going to be around. I want Peter to know that I’m his mom.’”
Melissa had no intention of taking her place as Peter’s mother, but she had made an enemy of her simply by dating the man who