A New Book for You to Read:

 (Friends, this is a book I wrote a while back, just for fun. Some of you might enjoy it -- a light-hearted mystery set in the South. Here is the first chapter.)

The Appearance of Death

Chapter 1

I chose to leave Atlanta late one night and drive along I-20 into South Carolina after midnight. Beau, my sweet Pomeranian, snored quietly in the passenger seat of my old blue Volvo. Except for the semi-trucks lining the exit ramps like sleeping seals, the road was mostly empty, and I had time to think. I was leaving it all behind – 32 years of marriage, my home and friends, my ridiculous string of jobs and community college classes. My husband Sam and I had lived apart for four years already, he in his dinky apartment and I in mine. Bless his heart, I don't think he intended for everything to fall apart so badly. He still thought I'd be there for him. He called at least once a week for one of my recipes because he can't toast bread and he had no money to go out to eat. Gone are the halcyon days of a large family home, a riding mower, a man cave, a fat paycheck, cigars in the den and supper on the table at 6:00. I do feel sorry for him, truly, I do. I knew after our first five years of marriage that we'd probably made a mistake, and after ten years that we certainly had. It took him a lot longer to accept the fact that he could not simultaneously have his secretary, his old girlfriend, his Playboy magazines, and me too. Sadly, he did not calculate how difficult life would be without his cook. It's been a shock to his digestion.

For four years after we split up I stuck around in Atlanta, wearily listening to his phone calls, fielding nosy questions from acquaintances and sympathy from friends, tolerating frowns from old ladies at church because I'd “left my husband.” I well remember when he called me more than three years ago, as I was moving into my dreary apartment in East Atlanta. By then he was trying to sell the house.

“Ivy, do you want the oak sideboard?” he asked.

“No, Sam. I'm renting a 600 square-foot apartment. I don't have room.”

“Does anybody want a sideboard? What about the kids? Karen? Ronnie?”

“Sam, nobody on the planet wants a sideboard these days. Take it to the thrift store.”

“I can't. I don't have the truck anymore.”

“What'd you do with the truck? Don't tell me you gave it to that …!”

“Don't you call her that, Ivy,” he interrupted.

“ … that pea-brained little ...”

“Ivy,” he cautioned.

“Well, she's a twit,” I countered, referring to his secretary Dawn, for whose pleasantries he would lose his job with State Farm. “Why'd you give her the truck?”

“Her car died. Transmission. Anyway, I don't know what to do with all this junk.”

All that junk. The effluence of 32 years of marriage. That was his grandmother's sideboard. My mother's mahogany bedroom set. The dining room table with our son Ronnie's name carved in it with a Swiss army knife. All unwanted. I felt instantly sad.

“Call Salvation Army or Goodwill. See if they will send a truck, and give it all to them. I don't want any of it.”

A year later Sam began using me as a dating service. He'd worked his way through all the younger women he knew and was moving on to my friends. He'd usually call on Thursday nights.

“Ivy,” he asked me last summer, “Do you think Doris Pritchard would go out with me?”

“I had lunch with her last week, Sam,” I replied. “She explicitly told me to tell you not to ever ask her out. All my friends are tired of you asking them out.”

“Ivy, I'm lonely.”

“How 'bout the secretary, Dawn? Did she finally get tired of you?”

“Ivy, that's unkind. She moved back to Oklahoma with her folks. She wants to go back to school.” I nearly choked on my frozen pizza at this reply.

“I hope you got your truck back.”

“Oh, she totaled it last year.”

“Well,” I continued, trying to be helpful, “there's always Penny, your old squeeze from high school. What happened to her?”

“Ivy, she got married. Didn't you get an invitation? She married Henry Fincher, and they moved to Pensecola.”

“Looks like you're out of gals, Sam. You'd better start clubbing downtown. I don't know what to tell you.”

He was silent a minute. “You wouldn't consid --”

“No,” I spat back. “No No No. I'm sorry you're lonely, Sam, but I got Beau, and I'm not lonely. I'm just fine.”

Click.

It took me those four years to realize that I needed to leave town, that jettisoning the furniture, the house, the time-share on the beach, the faded wedding dress and the framed wedding photos was a long process I'd nearly completed. I'm a slow learner.

Of course, he continued to call because Sam never thinks things are as bad as they really are. But that phone call changed something inside me, and I began gathering up the tattered fragments of my self-esteem and thinking of starting something new. I joined Weight Watchers and lost two dress sizes. I dyed my hair dirty blond and cut it short. I started taking new classes at Gupton-Jones College in Decatur. Finally, six weeks ago I threw my old cell phone in the trash and got a new number. That drove Sam crazy, and he started calling our daughter, Karen. When the 6-month lease on my apartment was done, I packed my few boxes and bags, put Beau in his plush doggie bed in the front seat, whispered good-bye to Atlanta, and drove away.

When I crossed the state line into South Carolina after midnight on that drive a month ago, I rolled down the windows. Beau growled. I cranked up the oldies station and sang along with Debby Boone and Barry Manilow. Miles of pine forest along the interstate made the world pitch black, and the air was heavy with the strong scent of pine. Strands of hair whipped around my face. It felt so good to be leaving, to be starting over, to shed the scaly gloom of my life. Barry Gibb began to sing and Beau chimed in with a piercing howl. I laughed, scratched his soft head, and breathed deeply of the night air. I hadn't laughed in a long time. I was stepping across a line, through a portal, into uncharted water.

copyrighted by M.K. Christiansen