Help Wanted by Sara Pritchard

Author:Sara Pritchard [Pritchard, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780983934677
Publisher: Etruscan Press

The Old Laughing Lady

Very slowly, Bunny had been working through the stages of grief like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s book instructed, but she seemed to have been stuck in the anger phase for an inordinately long time: twelve years. And anger was only the second phase of the grief-recovery process.

The first phase of grief — disbelief — she shot right through like Secretariat. In fact, that phase had only lasted a minute or so, if that. As soon as Gerald told Bunny that he was leaving her for his surgical nurse, Connie Simmons, Bunny believed it. Oh, she believed it, all right. She didn’t disbelieve it for one minute. She’d always suspected that there was some hanky-panky going on between the two of them. What she hadn’t suspected was that that something between them included two children.

And so the news came as a deadly two-stroke blow to Bunny, who was left grieving not just for the death of her long marriage but for the children she never had, the children who Gerald had led her to believe he was incapable of fathering.

What a prick! There she was, suddenly divorced at age forty-five. And childless. And where was Gerald? Relocated to Florida with his new bride and two adolescent children.

Bunny and Gerald had been married nearly fifteen years when Gerald made his little announcement, shortly after Connie’s husband — Gerald’s colleague, Rory Simmons — died. Of course, there was no way Gerald was going to make that move while Rory was still alive. Rory Simmons was the head of Cardiology, and Gerald’s ass would have been grass, so to speak, if Connie had left Rory for Gerald when Rory was still alive. And so Gerald and Connie had carried on a twelve-year affair — through four-fifths of Bunny’s marriage.

What a damn piece of genetic good luck for Connie and Gerald that Rory — like Gerald — was a redhead. Otherwise, how could Connie have explained those redheaded children? Connie was olive skinned and dark complected and had a nose like a plantain. Ansel and Agnes — names that sounded to Bunny like cattle raised by 4-H Club adolescents — were Connie and Gerald’s spawn. They both had inherited their mother’s proboscis, and their hair was their next most prominent feature, so they looked a perfect Simmons family fit: big nose, red hair. That Connie, she had all the bases covered.

So now Connie and Gerald were together, living the good life, Bunny supposed, in the Sunshine State, and Bunny was still stuck in West Virginia in the damn geodesic dome she and Gerald had built.

Bunny never wanted the dome, but Gerald was a big Buckminster Fuller fan back then, and he was the breadwinner, and back in those early days of their marriage, Bunny wasn’t very assertive. She was docile and impressionable, and she went along with everything, always deferring to Gerald. She was a people pleaser. It was her nature.

That was the old days.

The dome looked like a giant, half-buried golf ball. It

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