Choices Dwindled

 When he got home from work, Ron was exhausted. He lived in New Orleans but worked in a warehouse in Metairie. He worked hard, he worked long, he worked sad - this dead-end job beat his soul to within an inch of its demise. But it was all he'd ever known.

He sat down to his nightly whiskey or two after fixing himself a meal of biscuits and sausage gravy and, before he could succumb to overwhelming fatigue, Ron dragged himself out of the rickety wooden kitchen chair to go visit his wife.

His second wife. Ron's first wife never got him. There was a little magic in the beginning, although Ron suspected he was thinking with his groin and not his brain at the time. But life, as it has a predictable way of doing, got tough. He found jobs, he lost jobs, times changed and choices dwindled. He took what he could get and found himself trapped in a reality he could never have imagined. No hope, no escape; a slowly tightening vice. Cruelly fueled by a variable rate mortgage.

Ron's first wife, expecting better, became a drinker and eventually left him. After 27 years of marriage. She told him to his face that she could find a better husband with her eyes closed. Her second husband was a drunk that beat her. Ron took some satisfaction in that knowledge.

Ron met Nancy two years later. He was 53, she was 43. She made him deliriously happy. They got married. They shared the same interests, same sense of humor, same outlook on life. They enjoyed the same kinds of food, the same type of music. They went out to eat, they danced. It was a perfect relationship.

Nancy died three years after the wedding. Raging pancreatic cancer. Ron became a drinker. The only happiness he had ever experienced was snatched away from him and he could not understand it. But he kept up his visits with her. At the Lafayette Cemetery. Two or three nights a week.

On this night, as was his custom, Ron drove to Lafayette, walked to Nancy's small tomb, touched it and sobbed, as despair racked his body. Eventually he laid down in front of it on a thick blanket, using a work jacket for a pillow, and prayed for death. His only dream was to die. Life was unbearable.

He awoke the next morning to sunshine and humidity. And disappointment.

Once again, he picked himself up, kissed Nancy's tomb, went home to take a shower, and drove to Metairie.