Good morning everyone and welcome to October. Today is going to be a very busy day so let’s not waste any time and kick it off with the morning prompt. Timers set and off we go…
I like the set up although I will need to add more details. But I do like Alice.
Wednesday, October 1st: I’ll make tea.
“I’ll make tea,” Alice said. It was the first thing she thought of when calamity struck. It was what her mother and grandmother did. Any disturbance in the normal everyday running of things and the first way to solve things was to put the kettle on the stove.
Alice’s kettle was more the electric variety but she was fairly certain it was the routine nature of things rather than the heat source that allowed things to calm down. In truth, as she scooped out loose tea leaves from the canister, putting them into the tea ball, Alice felt the actions calming her. Making tea was such an normal thing. It had routine and regulated steps. The act of following them let Alice calm herself more than she thought it would.
She couldn’t say the same for anyone else. In the other room arguments raged and dire threats were made.
‘Perhaps I should have had one of them make the tea,’ she thought.
She snorted at the thought a she waited for the kettle to boil. If she asked any of them then some would have sneered or looked at her incredulously. Others would have probably smashed the teapot.
She leaned against the counter, arms crossed over her chest as she watched the others through the open doorway separating the kitchen from the space beyond. There was no dulling or muffling of voices, she could hear and see clearly. She suspected that people three houses over could hear clearly.
As Alice calmed she saw several solutions to the current dilemma. They seemed to float up through her brain so they could be skimmed from the surface of her thoughts with ease. There were, to her surprise now that she was thinking instead of reacting, several potential solutions. There were pros and cons to each of course. There was no magic wand to wave where everything was solved with no actual effort or work on anyone’s part.
There would need to be some hard work, and some sacrifice. Each option had it’s own list.
Alice sorted through them but looking and watching the others, she knew it would be pointless to mention them. First of all they would never listen to her. She wasn’t family. At least, not exactly family. Especially when it counted. Alice swallowed back the hard thought even as she acknowledged it. She married Frank because she fell in love with him. She tolerated his family because she loved him. Then he died.
She was all they had left of Frank, even though they had never gotten along with her. Therefore, she had to stay so they could keep his memory alive. Each year it became a more onerous duty. Slowly, Alice began untangling things from the family. Her finances were separated and in no way connected to the family. She was currently living in family space because they wanted her here, but that was just a matter of physical location. All else was separated out and no longer dependent on the family.
Not that any of them realized of course. They expected she was as dependent on the family company as they were. Which made the fact that she wasn’t allowed to comment on any family business all the more galling. She was Frank’s widow so she was family who had to be kept close but she wasn’t family when it came to the family business. Then she was an outsider.
It was a familiar attitude and why, when she inherited Franks shares in the family company she greed to sell them back to the core family. That was of course when the family was doing better.
Alice turned over the options in her mind but knew it was pointless. The family wanted a magic wand. They didn’t want to work for a solution and they certainly weren’t going to sacrifice.
Ten til Midnight 