Ah Tuesday and the last day of April. With the ups and downs of this month I am kind of happy to see it go. So let’s just see what the last prompt of April looks like. Then we can set it aside and hope that May is just a little bit more sedate. Timers at the ready and off we go.
Again I really like starting stories where one thing is ending and a new pone beginning. I think this just sort of took some of the beginning highlights and jammed them together. looking at this I would go back and break it down, add in the break up conversation and the divorce as well as the moving before moving on to the new start. I have noticed that not only to these prompts tend to favor passive voice, but I do tend to compress ideas so I can get all of the highlights down before the timer dings. So I suppose I should say I like the idea of this.
Tuesday, April 30th: I made a promise.
‘I made a promise,’ she thought. The thought was silly, absurd at this point in time. Yet somehow it kept circling. She hadn’t wanted the big wedding. As far back as she knew her family, they had always favored quick marriages at the Justices of the Peace. Nice clothes were bought, witnesses gathered and then afterwards they went to a nice restaurant. Oscar wanted the big church wedding. The bigger the better. The more grand his wedding the more prosperous he looked to those he wanted to impress.
Evie hadn’t even known more than a handful of the people that attended the wedding. Most of her family was gone. She invited a few friends and the rest of the people filling the church had been invited by Oscar. She remembered writing out thank you notes to strangers when they returned from their honeymoon.
Her thoughts shied away from the disaster that was the honeymoon as they always did. ‘Should have been a sign,’ she thought.
Still she stood up in a church and made a promise. In the end that is what a vow was she thought. ‘And there were several hundred witnesses.’
In the end that didn’t mean much. She kept her promise. Oscar didn’t. She saw signs of it throughout their marriage but as always her questions were answered, given logical explanations, her suspicions soothed. Her promise held. But now Oscar was clear. He was leaving. His latest was pregnant and he was starting a new family.
‘And that is how he put it,’ Evie thought. ‘His latest.’
She wasn’t sure why but that took some of the sting out of it. She suspected for a long time that Oscar didn’t care about her. When they failed to create a child, she realized that he married her simply because he wanted to start a family. He found her appropriate and perhaps for a time loved her. He didn’t anymore and Evvie suspected that his latest only mattered because of the pregnancy.
‘She doesn’t matter any more than I did,’ Evvie thought. It dimmed her anger and made letting go easier.
When the divorce went through Evvie found that Oscar, who she always considered placid and steady, had a bit of a mean streak. While the assets were divided, he seemed to feel a delight in pointing out that without his income she would have less money at her disposal and that without his family she would have less status. The fact that she had her own job and money didn’t matter to him. The fact that she didn’t care for his family or their status was irrelevant. By divorcing her, he was depriving her. And he seemed to enjoy the thoughts of her upcoming deprivation.
‘Which just makes things easier,’ she thought. She packed up the last of her things. She already sold the house and had another waiting. She would start a fresh new life on he own. Evvie smiled. She was actually looking forward to that.
Ten til Midnight 