Published July 17, 2020
For our readers who are suffering news fatigue caused by COVID-19, the Weekly News is providing some diversion by publishing a novel written by author Gail Lowe. Titled “The Widower’s Offering,” the story is about Otis Kingston, a man who lives in a town near Bangor, Maine. For Otis, life can’t get much harder. Not only has he recently lost his wife to cancer, he has also lost his job at the local paper mill. Life looks truly bleak until, one day while out for a walk, things begin to change.
Join us each week to see what happens next.
By GAIL LOWE
CHAPTER ONE
The letter, delivered in a white No. 10 envelope, return address Church of the Blinding Light, 139 Trinity Street, Hopewell, Maine, sits on top of a six-inch stack of mail on the kitchen table in Otis Kingston’s five-room bungalow.
If Fern were still alive, she would have torn the letter open the minute she found it in the mailbox. But not Otis. He has ignored the letter from the church along with thirty or so other pieces of mail, all containing bills for utilities, doctor and hospital visits and homeowner’s insurance. And there is one other bill he doesn’t even want to think about—the one from Serenity Funeral Home.
He has let his mail sit in a pile for the past two weeks unopened, thinking that nothing is so urgent that it can’t wait. Actually, if Fern were alive, she’d wag a finger at Otis and say in a playful way that he was losing his grip on life. Maybe he is.
“What’s the matter with you, Otis? You need to get a move on,” she would say, giving him a friendly nudge. And in response, he would pick up his fiddle and play “Tennessee Waltz,” her favorite song. And she would sit in her chair while watching him play, a wistful smile on her face. She might even get up and waltz throughout the room with her broom for a partner. How he missed his wife, his best friend.
He had counted on Fern to handle the mail and keep the household humming along for thirty-seven years. And now she is gone. He can almost hear her speaking to him from the grave.
“The house could use a coat of paint, Otis,” or “Can you give that toilet a fix? Running water drives me batty.” And he would pick up his fiddle and tell her there are more important things in life. Like music. Like a beautiful summer day. A bouquet of flowers. And she would smile that lovely wide smile of hers, the one he fell in love with so long ago.
Yes, he misses Fern, even misses the way she pestered him about the never-ending chores that needed doing. She hadn’t nagged the way some wives nag, though. Her prodding had been more like gentle reminders, like whispers in his ear. In some ways, she had kept his heart beating. She watched out for him by seeing to it that he had a hot dinner on the table every night and making sure he had clean underwear in his chest of drawers, even after working all day at the Tide View Nursing Home. It had been her job to fetch bedpans, help the residents into their wheel chairs, fluff up pillows and a hundred other things.
She’d come home every day at half past three, take off her shoes, fall into her chair by the window and put her feet up on the brown faux leather hassock. Then she’d tell stories about her day while they were having supper.
“Poor Mr. Dalton has had a terrible time with his innards, so they gave him a liquid laxative and now he’s ringing his buzzer every five minutes. And you know what that means . . .” And Fern would tell Otis it meant that poor Mr. Dalton couldn’t make it to the bathroom and she’d had to clean him up and change his sheets at least five times throughout the day.
Then, there was Margaret Stackpole, an elderly woman who, when younger, liked to dress up on Halloween and scare the kids half to death when they came to her door for tricks or treats. Fern once told Otis that Margaret rang the buzzer just so someone would come into her room, and that someone was usually Fern, and when she asked what Margaret needed she would answer, “Nothing, dear. I just wanted a little company.”
Though she would have liked to provide it, Fern had had no time to keep anyone company, not even those who were bed-ridden like Margaret.
There was the time a little romance was going on between two residents, both widows. Roy Halliday had had his eye on Helen Reynolds, a spinster, and at night he’d sneak into her room and get in bed with her. One night an aide caught them stark naked under the covers and told Fern she had to pull Roy out of the bed and get him back to his room. She had chuckled at the thought of Roy sitting in a wheel chair naked as a newborn baby under a sheet while being wheeled back to his own bed.
Fern’s supervisor, Evelyn Spencer, was always watching her, making sure Fern kept busy every minute. She hardly had time to use the bathroom, she had told Otis.
“There’s always something going on in that place,” Fern said. “Never a dull moment.”
After trying days such as these, Fern talked about quitting her job and retiring, but she never got to do that.
Otis is only fifty-eight years old and will likely live well into old age in spite of his parents’ early deaths. He has never smoked tobacco, drank alcohol or used the Lord’s name in vain, thanks to his mother’s teachings and near-perfect attendance at church over the years. So, he assumes, wrongly or rightly, that he will he live well into his eighties or nineties. If Fern were by his side he wouldn’t mind living a long life, but now thirty or so years without her seems like a long, lonely road.
Otis sits down at the kitchen table, rubs his eyes and pulls at his chin while staring at the pile of mail in front of him. His unemployment check isn’t due until the fifteenth of September, and it is only the sixth day of the month. His wallet holds two dollars; his pants pocket a total of forty-nine cents. Worse, the balance in his checking account shows that it has slipped below the required balance, and that means there will be another fee. When it happened last month, he tried his best to have the fee waived but Kelly, the pretty blond manager at the bank, scowled and said that as much as she would like to help him it was bank policy to help customers manage their money and imposing fees was simply tuition to the school of financial management. Most people, she said, kept a better watch on their spending when they were charged a fee. Otis realized then that though she was pretty on the outside, inside of this good-looking blond woman named Kelly was a heart of stone. When she saw the look on Otis’s face, she softened and said, “I’m sorry, Otis. I don’t make the rules.” He had to concede then that she was only doing her job.
Otis rubs his chin and feels the wiry brush of silver-white whiskers against the fingers of his right hand. His stomach growls and he thinks about the soup kitchen in Bangor. Today is Labor Day, so most everything is closed. Even the gas station. He will have to make do for today with what’s in the fridge and go to Bangor tomorrow, and the days after that if he hopes to eat. Otis has always been cautious about spending, but when Fern came down with cancer two years ago soon after she turned fifty-four the medical expenses far outweighed what they could afford to pay. There was no life insurance, either. That ended when he was let go from his job at the paper mill off Route 9 six months ago. Now, he is left with thousands of dollars in hospital and medical bills to pay, not to mention funeral expenses. He had requested a modest but decent service when she died in June, but it still cost him over three thousand dollars to bury her. He knows it could have been a lot worse. His neighbor, Ethel Marshall, told him that it cost her four times what Otis paid to bury her husband, Arnold.
Fern had encouraged Otis to find someone new to share his life with after she was gone, but he has no interest. For now, he wants to be alone with his grief.