a true tale

There was a divorced woman who lived alone in a small red brick ranch house in a small Middle American city with her calico cat. She had recently retired from the city’s school system, where she’d worked since the mid – 1960’s. Retirement wasn’t what she’d thought it would be. She tried to fill her time with gardening and reading. She did have, as Norma would later write, a million friends. There was a small group of girlfriends she looked forward to seeing every Friday for early dinner and conversation. They didn’t meet at a fancy place, but somewhere that they could all afford on fixed incomes.

One Friday, she didn’t show up.

“Wonder where Bertie Jo is?”
“I don’t know. She said she was coming.”
“She always comes.”
“I just talked to her yesterday; she didn’t say anything.”
“I bet she went to see her daughters for the weekend.”
“That’s got to be it.”
“But she didn’t mention she was going…”
“I bet she just forgot to tell us.”
“You’re probably right.”

And the ladies went on with their conversations of children, grandchildren, and husbands, and forgot to worry about Bertie Jo.

Mary, the neighbor across the street, who’d also known Bertie Jo since 1960, wondered, too, why the package from UPS sat on the front step all weekend long.

Four days later, at the request of one of her daughters, the town police came and broke into her home and climbed through the dining room window to discover her, lying crumpled, next to her bed…gone….

After the autopsy, the coroner told her daughters that her girlfriends could probably not have helped her, even if they’d come looking for her that Friday night. The mortician had to tell her daughters that it was probably advisable that they not look….

Bertie Jo’s girlfriends made assumptions, which cost her daughters the opportunity to see their mother one last time before laying her to rest.

I know the story is true, because one of her daughters was me.