Once again Leta reviewed her finances. While she was not a
spendthrift by any means, the money she had saved over the years was dwindling
more quickly than she believed would keep her for the rest of her life. She
partially blamed this on her former husband Claud Bassett, a man who always
seemed to be working but in fact rarely was, and at the same time, liked to
spend money. In the four years that they were married, he stormed through the
money left to her by her prior husband Bob Fields. By the time she divorced
Claud her savings were nearly gone. All she had was the house she bought, which
she sold within a year.
Now, not quite a year after she sold the house, she was living
in a three-room apartment in East Toledo. It was a pleasant enough place, fine
for just one person. It was a corner apartment with windows on two sides, facing
west and south. She had natural light nearly all day. The bedroom was small,
but she only used it for sleeping. The living room gave her enough space for a
sofa, two easy chairs, two end tables, a coffee table, and a hutch. The kitchen
had a nook large enough for a table and four chairs. She had two closets.
Certainly, times were different than when she was living in
boarding houses, in small bed-sits with common meals provided by her landlady
and a small electric burner that was officially to be used only for a coffee
percolator, but which she used for most of her own cooking. In those days, she
had no closet, but kept her dresses on hooks along the wall, and her other
clothing in the same cabinet she kept her dishes. She had some fear that if she
did not make a change soon, she might find herself in the same sort of
accommodation, living with generally much younger women or, worse, with women
who were down on their luck.
Sometimes she thought that these were supposed to be her finer
years. Her sisters had each married only once and to husbands who were
employed. Every morning they fed their husbands breakfast, the men left the
house for work, and the women spent the day taking care of their respective
houses. Their income was regular, they spent time with their children and
grandchildren. They were secure.
While Leta was not jealous—she had children, six
grandchildren, friends, and her own household chores—she did feel a kind of
wistfulness about how her life might be if Bob had not died so suddenly seven
years earlier, delivering her into the awful marriage with Claud, and
ultimately her current situation. She would, she presumed, be living more like
her sisters—relaxed, content and secure. More often than that, she wondered how
her life would be if her beloved Albert Mohr was not so viciously taken from
her all those years ago by a cold-blooded killer. Would she have more children
and grandchildren, for, indeed, they both wanted children together—her own band
of laughing, jolly people around all the time? Would she fall asleep every
night beside a man about whom she was always dizzy with excitement? Would he
still come home from work and take her in his arms as if she were the only
reason he had for being? Would she still sit in his lap? What an amazingly
happy, beautiful life she would have had with him!
However, he was gone; he had been gone for many years. She had
traveled many roads since then. She had stumbled and tripped and fallen and
scratched her knees. She had sweated and feared and cried. But she had
survived, and she would continue to do so.
So at age fifty-seven, Leta began to look for a job.
To be continued.
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