Chapter 11 Charlotte
Charlotte
Charlotte’s cat, Godiva, had passed away, and she was just too old to get a new kitten.
Once in a while, Charlotte saw an aged animal (like herself!) on the Savannah Humane Society adoption page, but honestly, what could be more depressing?
Still, she missed having something to feed, cuddle, and let in and out of her kitchen sliding door.
With Lee on a flight to Greece, Charlotte meandered around her house, nibbling cheese and crackers and opening and closing the little drawers of her antique side tables.
In one drawer, she found her first love letter from Paros, which he had placed on her room service breakfast tray on the morning the Splendido Marveloso docked in Sicily, Italy.
The paper was thin and crinkled; it read:
Homer wrote in the Odyssey that a many-headed monster (SCYLLA) guarded the entrance to the Strait of Messina and ate sailors who tried to approach…
and that the whirlpool CHARYBDIS waited for vessels…
Luckily, the Splendido Marveloso has already safely docked.
I love the view of Sicily and the Calabrian coast and I hope you have a wonderful day.
Yours,
Paros
Charlotte stared at the letter. It was an odd note, truth be told. Did Paros write notes to all the single ladies aboard his ships? Perhaps he’d found someone new by now.
Perhaps he was dead.
Charlotte went to her garage to grab a fresh bottle of Barefoot Chardonnay from the wine refrigerator. She looked at her new golf cart, her old car. For a moment, she thought of Minnie, her best friend, who had died over a decade before.
Charlotte wrenched her mind away from Minnie—how devastating her sudden death had been!
There was absolutely no point in thinking about sad and worrisome things.
Sometimes, to keep herself cheerful—to avoid worrying about Lee and her sleeping pills, for example, to trust her daughter when Lee said she was “fine” even though Charlotte’s gut told her otherwise—Charlotte needed wine.
She twisted her corkscrew feverishly, pulled the cork, filled her glass.
And furthermore.
It was a lonely thing, growing elderly. Becoming a “senior.” You thought you were old at seventy, but that had nothing on your eighties.
A man at church—Bruce Lark—had started saying, “Half my friends are dead, and the other half are half-dead!” He said it every Sunday after mass when they drank coffee and ate Publix pastries.
It had been funny the first time Charlotte heard it, but after that, not so much.
Anyhoo! Charlotte drank deeply, topped off her wine, went to her living room, and turned on her electric fireplace and her television. Turner Classic Movies was showing The Wizard of Oz. That was exciting.