Читать книгу I'll Be Watching You - M. William Phelps - Страница 21

I

Living on her own with the two kids hadn’t turned out so bad for Mary Ellen Renard. After moving out of the construction shanty, she found a cozy little apartment for herself and embraced her new independence. And, at first, things went well.

She found a good job. Friends. Although they’d had some trouble of their own, her daughters were alive.

Life had gone on.

Soon, though, bouts of loneliness and depression crept up on Mary Ellen and she began to crave companionship. For most of her adult life, she had been around people. She’d had a man—for lack of a better way to describe the abuser she lived with—in her life for almost two decades. But now, she was alone. And she didn’t want to be. So one night, Mary Ellen went to a church dance and met a man, a Catholic widower who met with her family’s approval. Despite a few nagging doubts, she married him. Yet, during the early days of her new marriage, she began to wonder if there was some sort of bull’s-eye on her back that attracted alcoholics and abusers. It was as if she had advertised for them. This new man turned out to be no different from her first husband.

“I would have divorced him sooner than nine months,” she said later, “but I was scared to leave him alone with his two daughters. Shortly after I left him, he burned the house down.” Luckily, it was a few days after the man’s daughter turned eighteen and had moved out with her sister.

II

Soon after the second chapter of her married life ended, Mary Ellen found what seemed like the perfect apartment. It was a two-family house in Elmwood Park, New Jersey, just outside Hackensack and Paterson, an area close to where she had grown up. It was the first apartment she had rented since her second divorce that felt even remotely like a home. It was in a rural neighborhood.

Nice people. Nice homes. Green grass. Picket fences.

Start fresh, Mary Ellen told herself, moving boxes up the stairs. Learn from the past.

After getting settled, Mary Ellen realized that it wasn’t necessarily the men in her past that had made her life a living hell—but the fact that she had chosen them. She resolved now to be more cautious. If she had picked two alcoholics and abusers, there was a reason. Now it was time to take an inventory and go back out into the world a smarter, more self-assured woman.