Blessings in disguise…

How typical that would have been for Lydia’s mother to say, happy wanderer that she was. Four marriages, only one lasting long enough to produce a child, all in the name of freedom, of liberty, of independence – even from your daughter, from your own flesh and blood. And in the end she’d died cold and alone in a bed that was too small, being eaten from the inside out by her own cells gone rogue.

What kind of freedom is it to die with no one’s arms around you?

No kind that Lydia wanted.

Eleven years. That was one-third of her life.

She went home that night (he was staying at her place for the immediate future, and probably beyond) and immediately opened the refrigerator. She tried not to look at his Sam Adams. There was wine. There was chocolate. She would have both.

So she drank and she thought and she cried, and she listened to Tom Waits, and before she slipped between the sheets, she went to her bathroom and stepped on the scale.

321 lbs. She’d been heavier.