I had always thought that old age was not a season but a special state of mind. Yet in my sixty‑eight years, I have also learned that it can be a loneliness that creeps in as stealthily as the autumn fog that settles over Coralville every September morning. My name is Prudence Edmunds.
It’s been two years since I buried my husband, Douglas. Thirty‑eight years of marriage is no joke. When you live with someone that long, their habits become your own, and their absence becomes a phantom pain.
I still make breakfast for two. Sometimes I pour two cups of coffee, and only when the steam stops rising over the second one do I remember there’s no one to drink it. In the mornings, I still wait for the sound of water in the bathroom and the creak of the floorboards under his heavy footsteps.
Douglas was a construction site inspector—not an elite profession, but he was proud that people lived in safe homes because of his work. We were never rich, but we weren’t poor either. Our house on Oak Street, a small two‑story with a porch, was paid off before Fenton turned ten.
Fenton is our only child, the only one we managed to conceive after five years of trying and three miscarriages. Maybe that’s why we spoiled him too much. Douglas always said a boy should have the best of everything: college, internships, a car for his eighteenth birthday.
We worked overtime, saved, denied ourselves a lot so our son would get a better education than we did. And here is the result. Our son is an information security specialist for a major insurance company, married to a woman who looks at me as if I were dirt beneath a designer heel whose name I can’t pronounce.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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