Title

 A good story always opens to a scene. I like that best. A scene is good to open the heart and mind of the reader. You will appreciate better the circumstances when you know them best. 

So here we begin. We are in a quiet kitchen. It is a week and a half since father's day. There are no balloons or  cakes or pictures pinned to the refrigerator door. There is no sign of any kind of father. Only the drip of the old coffee machine, a faulty kurig, keeping things from being too quiet. The life here feels deeply calm. Amanda stands still on the lanolium, taking it all in. She is a widow these past five years. Her husband passed away from liver disease in the fall, just before Thanksgiving. She is standing still, contemplating her emotions, how does she feel? Couldn't she feel something? Something for her husband? If even for his children?

Something about the quiet is profound. She looks at her floor and thinks of how he had put the new lenolium in not many years before he was gone for good. They picked out something that was popular, and now it was becoming outdated. Her curtains were dirty and needed to be cleaned or replaced. Her counters were looking cluttered and needed to be straightened. And most of all, she needed to do something to renew the spirit here. It was time for some letting go.

In a few days her son would be back for the summer. He was in college in Albuquerque and he would probably appreciate it if she cleaned it up a bit. But better, wouldn't it feel so nice if mom had done something a little to look like she was still living. Maybe a sign of hope would be a parental lifeline, she thought. Her eyes traced the counters around the room to the table, covered in papers and items of various use. She would clear away the debris and make a great meal. She would invite his brother and sister.

She went to work immediately,  with loud sighs accompanying the terrible weight of attempting to make change in here. Her goal was to give new life to something dead. It was dirty, unfashioned, depressing. Struggling to let go had been long complained about, by everyone. Mostly by her daughter who was around a lot. She had something to say about everything, all the time. Finally, she will say. She got rid of this finally. She got rid of that finally. 

The finality was not hard for her daughter. She seemed to be able to shake off everything. What a temperament. Didn't like the husband. Out! Didn't like her job, quit! Didn't like school, quit that, too, and now she has two jobs and hates them both. She complains about that too. She sees things as temporary or else she sees them as doomed. Amanda blames herself. She could have let some things go. She sees her daughter must be constantly correcting her mother's failures. Her daughter doesn't see it, but her mother does. Amanda hopes it's because she's still young. She was young once too, you know. 

Amanda met Blake, her husband, in college. They were in the same class in an auditorium. He had paid attention to her for a while before she finally made a move. She smiled standing in the hall outside and he stopped to say hello. What a romantic. She could have met another man in college, but as fate would have it, they kept talking. And talking became dinner, and dinner sex, and sex marriage. His drinking problem started long before they had met, she that found out later. When you are young, you think like young people do. She thought his heavy drinking was normal. Now she wished she had been one of those straight girls who meets a nice man at church. 

Let me see how to show you her husband without giving the whole story away. He was fairly handsome, well spoken, raised with some care, from a broken home. He had dreams of being able to be great at something, which showed in everything that he did, but he never had any drive or passion for anything in particular. Amanda was different. She had interests. She liked books and learning. She was at the top of her class in highschool, not because she wanted to do well, but because she decided that doing well would lead her to her dream. Her one dream. One day she was going to be a real news writer. She wanted to work for the paper. She used to collect editorials in a photo album her mother gave her for a scrapbook. She still had stacks of magazines in the attic. 

Her husband knew this about her and he appreciated her for being who she was. He was proud of her. She could tell that is why he had liked her, why he continued to respect her. But being a man, there was always that touch of jealousy, or envy. He didn't even have a goal in mind but hers was a threat, and it was always a thorn in their sides. He sabotaged her career. He belittled her dreams, he snickered and jeered. For twenty something years. 

Three children and no grandchildren. No one wants to have kids these days. They're all still young enough. She hoped that someday one of them would change their mind. They blame it on their parents. Although she tries to explain that when she grew up people weren't perfect. 

And everyone knew that, and staying together went without saying. She'll say, "see kids, I stayed because people stay," and mean it every time, but never know if she is wrong. She will say, "I believe in marriage. I believe in family." But everything was torn in two anyway because of his disease.  Then will come the need to think about it. What difference would leaving have made? A few years to myself, and Blake would have died anyway. I wouldn't have saved him that way. Or would I have? Tough love was another option. She'd feel disgusted after every thinking episode. 

Because this was happening for so many years now, the tension was mounting. She had to do something new, she was all alone in that house now. And her children, the true realization of her dreams, were all funked up because their father was abusive and an addict. Well, kind of. Everything is relative. 

Tearing down to everything felt good. Her curtains, her grandmother's pottery over the cabinets, she even bought some paint, and quickly recolored her walls. The new room was cleared of its clutter, and the table set.