"Nobody needs you at such an advanced age."
But a lawyer found me sitting on a bench in a park, with nowhere to go.
"Madam, your first husband, from the 1970s, has passed away. He left you forty-seven million dollars, but on one condition."
My name is Evelyn. Evelyn Rose Mercer. Although most people who knew me in my younger days called me Evie, I never imagined that at seventy-three, I would find myself sitting on a park bench, a suitcase at my feet and twelve dollars in my coat pocket. Not after thirty-eight years of loving a man. Not after thirty-eight years of cooking his meals, ironing his shirts, keeping house, raising his children, and shrinking whenever he needed more space.
But that's precisely where I found myself one cold November morning, in front of the Harrove County Public Library in Monroe, Georgia, watching pigeons peck at breadcrumbs on the sidewalk and wondering what I was going to do next.
My second husband, Franklin Mercer, asked me to leave the house on a Thursday. Sitting at the table, without even putting down his coffee cup, he announced that he wanted a divorce. He said it as casually as one might say they want to change the curtains. Just like that. Without hesitation and without appeal.
Franklin and I had met at a church fundraising dinner in the fall of 1984. He was a tall man with a broad smile and a firm handshake. He owned a small but successful hardware store in Monroe and, at the time, seemed like the kind of man you could always rely on.
I was forty-six when we got married. As a widow, I had already learned that life could take things away without warning. My first husband, Thomas Earl Grady, had died in the spring of 1975. We had only been married for three years. He was thirty-one when his heart stopped beating one Saturday afternoon. And overnight, the whole world I had built with him collapsed.
After that, I raised our son Marcus alone. I worked as a seamstress in a dry cleaner's in the east end of town for eleven years. I saved carefully. I grieved in silence. I kept going because Marcus needed me.
Franklin came into my life at a time when I had almost lost all hope. For years, he was a true blessing. We built a comfortable life together on Birwood Drive. His hardware store thrived from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. I helped him with the bookkeeping on weekends and managed the house during the week. We went to church together every Sunday. In the summer, we had barbecues in the backyard. Every December, we visited his sister in Tallahassee. It was a simple life, but I had learned to appreciate simplicity.
What I hadn't fully understood until it was far too late to change was that Franklin had always kept a part of himself separate. Not a mysterious or romantic part, but simply an inaccessible one. He never talked about money with me. He handled all the bills, all the accounts. And having grown up in a time when a woman trusted her husband with that sort of thing, I never pressed the issue.
The house was in his name only. I hadn't even thought to ask about it at our wedding. Why ask such a question about a house we thought would be ours forever?
The divorce lasted seven months and I got almost nothing: a small alimony payment, barely enough to live on for four or five months with extreme caution, and my personal belongings that I had brought to the wedding. My sewing machine. My mother's quilt. The photos of Marcus as a baby. That's all.
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