Rendezvous At the Altar by Thuan Le Elston

Author:Thuan Le Elston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rand-Smith LLC

***

Her own person.

Can't sleep. That damn movie. Just listen to my roommate snoring. How is anyone supposed to sleep with all this? Did I … Maybe the night nurse forgot to give me my pills after "the girls" dropped me off.

I could tell them a thing or two, my daughter-in-law and her two daughters-in-law. Vi could, too. But nobody asked us anymore. Once you were old, they just assumed things about you and didn't bother asking you anything anymore.

To hear Thuan speak about that movie tonight, you'd think she was a film reviewer, or a book critic, or something like that. But she wasn't. Where did she come off thinking she knew so much more than we did? Such conviction about what she knew. Where did she get the gall?

Sigh. Sorry, Lord, I shouldn't be so harsh on Thuan. I didn't know about Mariko, and Keith told me the Japanese are extremely polite people. But Thuan had been in America since she was a kid. If you closed your eyes and listened to her, Thuan was American. Modern, and whatever that went with it.

Thuan was nice and kind to me in her own way. But I understood — she wasn't really interested in me. I was just her husband's grandmother. I can't express myself very well. I even talked slowly, while she just rattled away a mile a minute. I didn't even know what to talk to her about. I had never finished high school. And here, English wasn't even her first language and she was some sort of editor at some big American newspaper.

She was just young, wrapped up in her here and now, and I can understand that, Lord. I remembered how selfish I was when I was younger.

Hal had always been the one with the more interesting stories to tell. The boys were always asking him for more, how he started with nothing but worked so hard to overcome his odds: the Army, owning a grocery store, getting a college degree later than he should have, his days as a traveling salesman with Dun & Bradstreet. Hal could even spin stories about his parents, a janitor and a homemaker who both are now part of the dust in Columbus, Nebraska. They were mythical somehow.

Meanwhile, I was just a wife and mother. I didn't have a business until I was already old: the daycare center with my second husband. For a while, back in the '80s, my oldest son wanted me to write down my life story, and I sent him letters about it. He had questions, and I tried to answer them as best I could. I did, Lord. I tried.

Some answers you had to keep for yourself, though. Some answers belonged to nobody else but you. You owed yourself that much.

I mean, Hal was a traveling salesman. He loved what he did. He investigated and wrote credit reports on businesses large and small. Hal was among the best of Dun & Bradstreet's hundreds of salesmen in the USA.

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