Chapter Twenty-Five

Since the death of ReBarb Zimmerman, Alice Gerding Zimmerman had thrived. The extra forty pounds she had carried for over ten years was now gone. Color had returned to her cheeks and her sister commented that she looked ten years younger. It was easier to smile now, to laugh and enjoy every simple thing that happened in a day. It felt to Alice as though a burden she had carried with her day and night for nineteen years was gone. She rose every morning ready to face the day. She enjoyed going to the job she’d held for more than ten years in the title office on Main Street. Most of the women in the office didn’t bother to wear make-up or do anything special regarding their appearance, but to Alice, the world was new. She felt like the girl she had been before her marriage to ReBarb Zimmerman.

On occasion, when she lay in the quiet of her bedroom at night, she wondered in a removed fashion if she should feel guilty for the overwhelming relief of ReBarb’s death. The feeling was there, but when she examined the barest smidgen of guilt, it was there and it was a fact, but it didn’t ring true. She cared enough for her children to deny herself exuberant jubilation at the thought of his death. After the foolishness of being caught literally dancing on his grave she had returned to her normal quiet demeanor. Alice supposed she should have been embarrassed by her own behavior and the attention it had garnered in the local newspaper but she wasn’t. There wasn’t an ounce of mortification in her. She found it amusing that others had not thought she was capable of such outrageous actions. But it didn’t matter now, she thought sighing and smiling, remembering the look on the local grocer’s face when she had purchased the lone dusty magnum of champagne he stocked in his small liquor department. That was the night she had driven to Columbia, purchased a new red outfit, a color she loved and Rebarb hated. She’d also bought a pair of leather boots with three-inch heels and those same heels had made quite a mark in the fresh mud around ReBarb’s grave.

There was indeed no guilt for Alice in feeling relief at ReBarb’s death, no remote anxiety or feeling of compassion any longer existed for her. Alice remembered the nights she had fantasized that possibly ReBarb would lose control on slick roads or there would be an accident when he was hunting. For those glimmers of weakness during their marriage she had felt guilty and had gone to confession. The priest had tsked and prayed with her and then given her mild penance of Hail Marys and Our Fathers. She had performed the penance without hesitation, but still, the fact remained.

ReBarb Zimmerman had turned into a beast of a man and she had been married to that beast for nineteen very long years. If he had not become so careless and thoughtless, if she had not finally begun to notice the late and later hours and the strange late-night hang-up phone calls, his philandering and infidelity might never have become obvious to her.

The first baby came when she was eighteen years old and since that day, ReBarb had done exactly as he pleased. His own mother was terrified of him — of the raging bull that her son had become, a cursing and insulting braggart. He was insensitive to his young wife’s needs and then to the needs of his young family. ReBarb lost his factory job and then lounged in the comfort of the unemployment checks for as long as they lasted. For a year they lived with her aunt, her only relative in town. She had taken grocery money from the retired woman only until she could start back to work herself to earn enough to care for the baby.

Rebarb gave little consideration to Alice’s growing worry about how she would buy formula for a colicky newborn and then added insult to injury by taking his small state-sponsored income and spending it on a new fishing rod, a hunting rifle, a compound bow or a handgun. At last they found a cold, vacant apartment on a side street near the town square. A rabbit warren of old storefront rooms, the apartment was cavernous, huge and echoing with fifteen-foot ceilings. Their meager furnishings were swallowed by the space. Anxiety consuming her, Alice fretted about everything, it seemed. How to keep the baby healthy, vaccinated, warm at night and in diapers; how to feed her ravenous husband on a grocery budget of fifty dollars a month, how to pay the utility bills and rent, how to keep the crumbling old building clean. One Thursday morning, eighteen months after their wedding, she woke up to the realization that she was expecting another child.

Every day the reality and responsibility of being an adult increased and every day Rebarb became more bitter and more restless. The purchase of the house on the edge of Franklin had satisfied his desire to show the small-town populace that he was a man of means. It was a monster of a bungalow, just like the old apartment, too expensive to heat and entirely too large for the young family. Alice had started to protest that it was not what she wanted but ReBarb’s scowl was so venomous she found herself backing away in fear of her husband.

And so they moved into the old house, the locals whispering that ReBarb’s mother had borrowed the money for the mortgage and then handed the property over to the couple. Small towns were not the place for secrets and Alice heard the talk. Slowly, by inches, she learned to resent the boy she had loved. It was a creeping, growing thing, like the poison ivy that twined around the dead elm tree in her front yard. Every month and every minute that ReBarb mistreated the children and then spoke to her as if she were the dirt under his feet, that vine grew and steadily squeezed the compassion out of her until even the resentment and the anger were gone. She simply did not want to live with the unconscionable animal that ReBarb had become.

After spending more than one night cowering in a corner, the children crying in their bedrooms while she waited for his fists to rain down on her, she finally shut off her ability to feel anything where ReBarb was concerned. But the church did not believe in divorce and so she stayed. She tolerated the screaming temper tantrums which he threw like a child when she drew his attention to an overdue bill that could no longer be avoided. She grew to expect the swagger in his step when he would stomp out to the front porch, light a cigarette, and then leave her to find her own way to pay another of the credit cards she didn’t know he had or an account at a local retailer which had grown beyond reason. But nonetheless, she found herself amazed and wounded when, answering the door one evening, dish towel in hand, she had been served with a petition for divorce.

It seemed ReBarb had found greener pastures with not only a younger woman, but a woman who would underwrite his expensive tastes. So he moved on, to give the town gossips more fuel for their fires as Alice suffered the additional degradation of a divorce. Then, in the last few years before his death, ReBarb’s recently acquired bride started to show signs of the emotional and physical beatings Alice herself had been subjected to. Attention now turned to her as a victim and the idea arose with those same town gossips that perhaps Barber Zimmerman, the charmer, former captain of the local football team, had lead a hidden life in the decrepit house with which he had burdened and then abandoned Alice and the children.

Her sister had told her it would happen. “Leopards don’t change their spots!” she’d said vehemently when Alice had been mortified at the public humiliation of ReBarb Zimmerman’s actions.

Leopards might not change their spots, but as Alice Gerding Zimmerman lay in bed that December night, she was determined to change her life. Never mind the series of blows that fate had dealt her. Moving one hand under her pillow, she touched the lottery ticket carefully. It was still there. The town of Franklin Hill only knew Alice Zimmerman as the quiet, unassuming, brow-beaten woman who had been married to the smooth-talking ReBarb Zimmerman. But that would soon change. She smiled again and sighed as she closed her eyes. Something good had finally happened. Her time had come. Tomorrow morning she would call Bernadine Turner about the children’s Christmas Fund and then get the phone number from her for Anthony Turner. Then she would speak to a real estate agent about the house. Or maybe she would just walk away and have them push the house over. She had always hated it, after all.

She gathered her thoughts again to her situation. Alice was going to need a lawyer and maybe even an accountant, she was sure. People with seven-figure incomes did that, she thought. They might even have maids. And Alice was now one of Those People.