Part the Fourth
Things start to get interesting.
In April 2009 (notice that dates get more specific from here on, as she hoards them like coins) her father had a major brain aneurysm that nearly killed him. It didn’t, but he was never quite the same afterwards. She supported her parents financially, putting her own self into debt, but it didn’t matter and wasn’t important.
In 2015 her mother moved in with her. Her mother liked the colder weather, and her father liked the warmer, so he moved in with her sister in sunnier climes. Was she happy? Goddamn straight she was. She had her mother with her every day. Anything her mother asked for, she got. Not that her mother asked for much – and don’t sit there shaking your head and thinking bad thoughts – but it was just that she would do anything to make her parents’ lives as easy as possible. She and her mother got some chickens for the big backyard. They got some snakes to go along with the cats and the birds. They spent a lot of time talking, and laughing, and just sharing the silence. She could come home from work tired and angry over something silly, and just seeing her mother made her day instantly better.
It was wonderful.
In April 2018 her father died.
Toni L.H. Boughton 