tidy and as sadly worn as the others and just as needy of a cleaning.
Sighing, she turned out the light and bypassed the bathroom to look in the spare bedroom, where she would be staying alone during the week and with Daniel on the weekends. When she flipped on the light, she gasped and stepped back. There had to be a bed in this room somewhere, but she couldn’t see past the three tall dressers and the dozen or so tall tin cabinets and wardrobes huddled together, leaving only a narrow aisle.
Charlene groaned out loud.
There was no way she could get all this stuff up into the attic as Aunt Dorothy suggested. Dismayed, she closed her eyes for a moment to concentrate on positive thoughts. Unfortunately, they were as thin as Aunt Dorothy’s bedspread.
Charlene let out another groan and opened her eyes. Cleaning the house would take hours and hours. She would probably be up half the night, which meant she could barely spare time to drive home to pack some clothes for herself, let alone think about spending her last night of freedom with her husband.
Worried that he might think she was overeager to be apart from him, she inspected the spare bedroom again to figure out the quickest way to make the room habitable.
If the wardrobes and cabinets were not too heavy, she might be able to shove them closer to the wall, along with one of the dressers. She opened one cabinet and found it stuffed with bags: grocery bags, shopping bags, plastic store bags, garbage bags and even a few small white bags from Sweet Stuff.
She tried one of the wardrobes. It held so many blouses there wasn’t room for one more. Another cabinet was filled with recycled glass jars that her aunt had labeled for flour, sugar, pancake mix and more. Charlene opened one jar, saw the remains of several brown critters and promptly screwed the lid back on.
The other four wardrobes were packed with clothing, just like the first, and the remaining cabinets held a variety of rusted canned goods, laundry products, cleaning supplies, string, rubber bands and what looked like several years’ worth of newspapers.
Charlene’s first impulse was to pick up her cell phone to call and order a Dumpster; instead, she simply closed all the drawers and doors. She had heard that many people who had lived through the Great Depression in the 1930s never recovered from the deprivations of that era, and Aunt Dorothy’s spare bedroom held proof that it was indeed true.
From what she was seeing Charlene suspected that Agnes Withers’s concerns about Aunt Dorothy’s competence were valid. Charlene was going to need to monitor her aunt much more closely than she had thought. She also had to do something to repair her troubled marriage, or she would spend the rest of her days with a heart as weak and broken as Aunt Dorothy’s had been found to be.
Chapter Six
A t six-thirty on Saturday morning, Ellie laced up her sneakers and tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen. She slipped the spare key into the waist pocket in her walking pants and zipped the pocket closed. Another pocket held her cell phone and a mini change purse. She tapped in the security code on the alarm pad, opened the back door then quickly reset the alarm and slipped outside.
Setting the house alarm reminded her that her cell phone was still programmed to vibrate. She hadn’t used that mode much until her mother had gotten sick and Ellie had needed her cell phone on when she was teaching. Rather than resetting the cell phone now, she moved it into a smaller pocket so she could feel the vibration if someone called.
She drew in a huge gulp of crisp, fresh air, feeling her spirits lift with joyful thoughts of total freedom. For the next forty minutes or so, she would be completely alone with her thoughts on her first power walk since her mother became ill and moved in with her. Fortunately for both of them, their body clocks were as different as their personalities. Ellie liked to go to bed and get up early. Her mother liked to watch late-night TV and spend her mornings sleeping in. Once Ellie returned to work next Monday, she expected to see precious little of her mother. She hoped to build a more positive, loving relationship between them in the few hours they would have together.
Ellie stretched her muscles for a few minutes, then headed across her small backyard to the alley behind the house. As usual, the neighborhood was quiet at this hour. She quickly covered the two long blocks to the avenue and turned right toward the center of town. With virtually no traffic to worry about, she walked in the street close to the curb, avoiding the nuisance of going up and down the curbs at cross streets.
Block after block of residential homes, a mix of single-family Victorians, converted duplexes and World War II-era twin homes now called town houses soon gave way to the revitalized business district. New brick sidewalks had replaced cracked and broken concrete. Planters on each corner had recently been filled with fresh dirt and mulch, and sat waiting for volunteers to plant colorful flowers that would bloom from next month through the end of summer.
When a sparkle in the street caught her eye, Ellie smiled and stopped to pick up a dime. She started walking again as she slipped the coin into the mini change purse she carried for her funny money—change she found on the ground and had fun collecting in a cookie jar at home before donating it to a local charity. She had given nearly forty dollars to the new girls’ crew team last year, but she hadn’t yet decided on this year’s recipient.
She kept her pace quick. When a pair of early-morning joggers passed her, she didn’t feel a twinge of envy. Walking briskly was a good way to strengthen her post-menopausal bones and heart without adding stress on her knees.
She passed the town’s newest restaurant, La Casita, and the ice cream parlor, Scoops, where a good number of her tenth-grade students would probably congregate tonight after the basketball game. With her heart and her feet hitting a steady rhythm, she passed other storefronts: The Deep End, an eclectic gift boutique; the unisex beauty salon; The Purrple Palace, a pet shop catering to felines. All the stores were new to the avenue.
When she spied Pretty Ladies, a hair salon that had survived in the small town’s shopping district through the mall-building era and now thrived in the boom of the revival, she made a mental note to call later today. She needed to make a home appointment for her mother to have her hair done.
Growing traffic on the avenue in the heart of the business district forced Ellie onto the sidewalk in front of The Diner, where the air was heavy with the smell of sizzling bacon. Inside, seniors who shared her habit of rising early were taking advantage of the breakfast special and the owners’ policy of encouraging the patrons to linger long after they finished eating.
Beyond The Diner, she stopped to pick up a penny, crossed the street and passed Sanderson Realty, the only real estate office in town. The closer she got to McAllister’s Bakery—voted best of South Jersey for the past seven years—the harder she found it to concentrate on anything but sugared pastries.
She didn’t slow her pace, but she did take several good whiffs of air, savoring the luscious aromas of butter, cinnamon and apples that drew the line of people waiting to enter. She deliberately didn’t carry money with her on her walks so she wouldn’t be tempted to stop and take home more calories than she would burn. She had another plan for where her calories would come from today.
To avoid the line outside the bakery, she returned to the street and hugged close to the parked cars until she reached the bank, which was the one-mile mark from her home. She used a pedestrian walkway to cross the street and start the return mile toward home. She had one destination in mind—Sweet Stuff.
Before the day ended, she needed to replenish her candy stash, at home and at work. Although it was way too early for the candy store to be open, she wanted to check the store’s hours on Saturdays and see if they had been extended for the Easter holiday.
When she had to stop at the corner for a turning car, Ellie spied two quarters in the street and gleefully added them to her mini purse. Approaching the candy store, which shared an entryway with a recently opened health-food store, she was convinced this was the oddest pairing of businesses ever to grace the avenue.
At the door of Sweet Stuff, she read the sign listing the store’s hours. Saturday, noon to five. She sighed. Charlene Butler