by Pamela Kay

Created on: June 24, 2009

Millie

The chilled October breeze rushed through the ancient oak rustling what was left of the leaves and showered a few on the frail woman who sat beneath. A nurse's aide rose from a bench, walked the few steps to the wheelchair where the old woman sat and tucked her shawl more closely around her thin shoulders.

"Are you ready to return to your room Millie?" she asked with a hopeful voice but Millie only lifted her hand and signaled she was not. Millie never spoke, had not spoken for over sixty years, since shortly after she received the dreaded visit from Army officials, telling her that her husband Howard was missing in action.

Weeks of agony had followed as her mind recalled everything she'd ever heard or read about the treatment of prisoners of war. She threw herself into working the Victory Garden she had planted, rolling bandages made with the last of her linens and becoming even more frugal with her rationing coupons than she had been before.

These activities gave her a sense of helping her poor brave Howard, wherever he was, as did the hours of praying that had caused rough calluses on her knees. She didn't care; she had no hose to wear anyway and no one to dress up for.

Millie might have recovered from this had it not been for two incidents that occurred only one week apart. The first was a brief moment when she witnessed something in the doorway across the street that should have been private and the second occurred in the same doorway one week later.

After that, Millie knew there was no God and she had ceased to live in the present. Her body did continue to function, but Millie was locked forever in the past and each day her thoughts started at her early childhood and proceeded to the day of the second incident. After spending two months in a hospital, her sister had taken her home to her house and looked after her until she died forty years later and Millie had come to live at Crestview Nursing Home.

Betty

Betty and Martin had come to live across the street from Millie and Howard two years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She was outgoing and vivacious where Millie was quite and modest in her approach to life. They knew each other as everyone on the street knew each other but it could not be said that they were friends. They were neighbors, nothing less, nothing more.

Martin was a fast rising star in banking and Betty spent his money faster than he could earn it on the newest cars, latest fashions and trips to the salon to have her

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