Bygones

Bygones by Lavyrle Spencer

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Authors: Lavyrle Spencer
Tags: Fiction
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just as soon as his other wife throws him over. He makes me sick.”
    Guilt struck Bess for having instilled such hate in her son without a thought for its effect on him. “Randy, I’m sorry you feel this way.”
    “Yeah, well, it’s a pretty quick switch for you, isn’t it, Mom? I’d just hate to see him make a fool of you a second time.”
    She felt a surge of exasperation with him for voicing what she’d been feeling. Let this be a lesson, she thought. If you mend fences between yourself and Michael, keep your distance while doing it.
     
    Chapter Five
     
    The following day was Sunday. There was Mass in the morning, prefaced by a battle to make Randy get up and go, followed at home by a lonely lunch of chicken breasts for two, with very little table conversation.
    Randy left immediately afterward to go to his friend Bernie’s house to watch a football game on television. When he was gone, Bess changed into a sweatsuit and returned downstairs, where the silent, familyless rooms held a gloom that was only amplified by bright day beating at the windows.
    She did His, some designwork for a while, but found concentrating difficult. She I gave up, distracted by thoughts of Michael and their sundered family. She was not a tearful person, yet her aloneness had magnitude enough to force a pressure behind her eyes. In time it drove her to pick up the telephone, dial her mother, and ask if she could visit.
    “I’d love it,” Stella Dorner said in her usual cheerful voice.
    Stella lived in a town house on Oak Glen Golf Course, on the western edge of Stillwater . She had bought it within a year after her husband died, and had furnished it with sassy new furniture, declaring she hadn’t been buried along with him and wasn’t going to act as if she had. Though she was nearly sixty at the time, she’d on tir her job as an on-call operating-room nurse, had taken golf lessons, and had even signed up with a dating service. But she claimed that all the crotchety old men she’d been paired up with couldn’t keep up with her. Stella answered the door dressed in a sweatsuit the colors of a paint rag-white with smears of hot pink, yellow, and purple. Over it she wore a disreputable lavender smock.
    “Bess, darling. I’m so glad you called.”
    She hugged her gingerly. “Careful! I don’t want to get any paint on you.”
    “Paint?”
    “I’m taking a painting class. I’m working on my first picture.”
    Stella led the way into the living room, where the west window was unreached yet by the afternoon sun. Before the window stood an easel with a partially finished rendering of an African violet. “What do you think?” Stella asked.
    “ Mmm . . .” Removing her jacket, Bess studied the painting. “Looks good to me.”
    “It probably won’t be, but what the heck.
    The class is fun, and that’s the object. Can I get you a Coke?”
    “’Thanks. I’ll get it. You keep on with your work.” Bess went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.
    “How are the kids?” Stella called.
    “That’s what I came to talk to you about.” Bess entered the room, sipping her pop, and sat herself on the sofa, drawing her knees up.
    “Oh-oh. This sounds serious.”
    “ Lisa’s getting married . . . and she’s expecting a baby.”
    Stella studied her daughter. “Maybe I’d better put these paints away.” She reached for a rag and cleaned her brush, then joined Bess, on the sofa. “Well . . . does she want the baby?”
    “Yes, very much.”
    “Ah, that’s a relief”
    “Guess what else.”
    “There’s more?”
    “I’ve seen Michael,” Bess told her.
    “My goodness, you have had a week, haven’t you?”
    “Lisa set us up. She invited us both to her apartment to announce the news.”
    Stella laughed. “Good for Lisa. That girl’s got style.”
    “I could have throttled her.”
    “And how is Michael?”
    “ Disdetached again, on his way to getting another divorce.”
    “Oh, my. No wonder you wanted to talk.

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