Charlotte Hughes - A New Attitude

Sheets covered the furniture and the old piano where she had once practiced her scales under the tutelage of Mrs. Sadie Habersham until her behind felt as if it were growing into the piano bench. The wooden floors wore a thick layer of dust. Heavy brocade drapes locked out the early-morning sun. Lord, but they were ugly, what with those thick cords twisted together like a bunch of snakes in mating season. The tassels looked as though they belonged in a bordello. What had her mother been thinking? They’d obviously been on sale, because one thing Hester Brown had never been able to pass up was a K mart blue-light special or a clearance table.

Wait a minute…Cords?

Marilee stepped closer and examined them. Three nylon strands were braided to make one thick cord. She tugged hard. The fabric was still good and strong. She glanced up at the beam that ran beneath the raised ceiling, her mind working frantically. Her answer was right in front of her.

She would hang herself!

Marilee hurried into the kitchen, to the junk drawer where her mother had kept everything that would fit and crammed in those things that hadn’t. She found a pair of scissors and went to work. Each cord was about five feet long when she pulled the drapes open. She cut four lengths from the living-room drapes before making her way into the master bedroom and guest rooms, where the same drapes, different only in colors and degrees of ugliness, hung. It was no easy task cutting through the cords, and by the time she finished, she wore a blister at the base of her thumb. Gathering them together, Marilee realized she had enough cord to hang a gang of outlaws.

Grady had underestimated her. He figured since she’d never earned a college degree that he was the smarter of the two. It didn’t matter that the reason she hadn’t earned a degree was that she’d had to work two jobs to support them while he went to seminary school. Not that she’d minded. They were a team, working toward a future. Even when Grady sometimes felt he wasn’t meant to preach, she would reassure him, bolster his self-confidence. Wasn’t that part of being a wife and team member?

Once he’d become a pastor, she’d devoted her time to church activities. She’d been good at it too, or so she’d thought, until Grady began complaining about every little thing she did. It only made her more determined to work harder. Even if Grady found her lacking, others claimed she was the veritable backbone of Chickpea Baptist Church.

A lot of good it did her now.

Marilee sat on the sofa and began tying the cords together. The frayed tassels clashed with her outfit something awful, but she had no choice. An hour later, she had a sturdy, if gaudy-looking, hangman’s noose. She spent the next ten minutes trying to throw the noose over the beam, and was about to give up before she remembered the ladder in the garage. It could also be used as her jumping-off place.

Heavens, but she could be brilliant at times!

Marilee dragged the ladder inside the house and placed it beneath the beam. Holding one end of the cord between her teeth, she began climbing. Okay, so the ladder was a little wobbly. She suddenly remembered her fear of heights and became angry with herself. She didn’t have time to fret about every little thing.

Pausing halfway up, she attempted once again to throw the noose over the beam, all the while struggling to hang on to the ladder. Finally! She tied it so it wouldn’t pull free. Marilee knew how to tie just about every kind of knot there was, thanks to Josh’s stint in the Boy Scouts.

Crouching at the top of the ladder, she slipped the noose around her neck. Her hands trembled. She had no idea how much it was going to hurt, but the pain could be no worse than what she was feeling inside.

With an angry burst of determination, Marilee stood straight up. And banged her head on the ceiling beam with such force she almost fell off the ladder. In fact, she would have, had she not grabbed the beam to steady herself. The room spun wildly beneath her and she felt her eyes cross. Her skull throbbed. Afraid she’d given herself a concussion, Marilee stood there, trying to clear her head. The floor seemed miles away. It felt as if she was standing on top of Chickpea’s water tower, where she and Grady had sneaked up the night she’d turned sixteen. They’d kissed under the stars and promised to love one another forever.

Forever. So why, at age thirty-five, was she all alone in the world?

Marilee swallowed the lump in her throat. Well, she wasn’t really alone. She had friends who loved her, people who were probably worried sick about her this very moment. And she had a son. He might not like her right now, but what if he—heaven forbid—ended up blaming himself for her suicide? Josh would have to spend his entire life living with it.

What if he was just going through a stage and didn’t really hate her? What if there was the slightest chance of reconciliation?

What was wrong with her? Hadn’t she seen enough suffering in her life to know that everybody got a dose of it now and then? Parents died, kids rebelled, husbands cheated. And here she was, standing on top of this shoddy ladder with a noose around her neck and what could possibly be a serious head injury. Not only that—her best outfit and makeup were ruined, her shoes were all wrong and she smelled like a Texaco station.

She was being weak and selfish, Marilee told herself. She needed to stop wallowing in self-pity and start working on her problems, namely getting her son out of that den of iniquity. She needed to clean up her parents’ house, find a job and show folks that she was made of tougher stuff than this! And she was tough, dang it. As a minister’s wife, she had sat with the dying, comforted the bereaved and brought smiles to nursing-home patients who felt neglected, of no use to the world and wanted to die. “The Lord has a purpose for us all,” Marilee had told them. “He will bring us home when he’s ready. Until then, we must have faith.”

She was glad those poor people couldn’t see her now, those who were old and sick and in pain. She was young and healthy and had every reason to live. It didn’t feel that way right now, but tomorrow she might see things differently.

Tomorrow. She suddenly realized she wanted to wake up to another day, no matter how bleak the future seemed at the moment.

But first she had to get down this ladder in one piece.

Her mind made up, Marilee tried to decide the best way to descend without ending up in a wheelchair and sporting a handicapped sticker on her car. Working up her last nerve, she oh so slowly knelt at the very top, trying to balance herself like a seal on a large ball. Her high heels proved a serious hindrance, and she decided she had to remove them. Somehow. Still perched precariously, Marilee tried to slip one off, but the ladder gave a shudder and veered right. Quickly she leaned in the opposite direction but overcorrected. Dang, she thought, only a split second before she lost her balance and toppled.

She had been so intent on getting down she had forgotten to take off the noose. Now it snapped tight around her neck. She was only vaguely aware of a noise overhead, and then it sounded as if the whole house was crashing down around her. Poor Josh. It was her last thought. Something hit her on the head, and then there was blackness.

SAM BREWER WAS IN A FOUL MOOD. As he grabbed a shovel from the garage and carried it to his mother’s flower bed, he could only imagine what the neighbors were saying as they peered out the windows at him. Without a doubt, Edna-Lee Bodine from across the street had her nose pressed flat against the windowpane this very moment, watching and fogging up the glass.

“There goes Sam Brewer digging in his mother’s flower bed again,” she’d tell her husband, who kept his own nose buried in a newspaper. “No telling what that old bat has gone and buried this time.” There were times Sam wished his mother would bury Mrs. Bodine in the flower bed. “And just look at him,” Edna-Lee would say. “Why, he looks like a derelict. No telling when he last shaved or combed his hair.”