PROMPTuesday #13 - Finish It

San Diego Momma's PROMPTuesday #13:

for today’s exercise, I’d love you to add to the sentences provided below. Complete the paragraph and continue the story.

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“Wait!” I screamed after her. “Your hat!”

She ignored me, which was to be expected. We hadn’t talked, not really anyway, in more than 10 years. I scooped up her black hat. The mesh veil fluttered beneath my fingers…

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Author's Note: I TOTALLY CHEATED on this one. I practically doubled both the time and the length, constrants that San Diego Momma laid out. I justify my transgression by saying that I was on a roll and ooh, I had FUN with this one -- Cocktail Maven

“Wait!” I screamed after her. “Your hat!”

She ignored me, which was to be expected. We hadn’t talked, not really anyway, in more than 10 years. I scooped up her black hat. The mesh veil fluttered beneath my fingers…

I considered going after her. I could have caught her before the service, but I was expressly NOT invited. The years of enduring her hatred kept me rooted to the doorstep, hat in hand. “Serves her right” I said aloud. I knew how strongly she felt about graveside decorum. She would be mortified to arrive bareheaded and barefaced.

It’s hard to believe my sister Joan and I were once incredibly close. So close, in fact, that we built a home together. It is a two story Spanish affair with identical floor plans upstairs and down: Two bedrooms, a large eat-in kitchen, living room and one and a half baths. The stacked cottages differed only in our color choices. Joanie was fond of mauve, while I leaned more toward greens and cream. We intended to grow old together here in harmony and mutual support. Having remained unmarried well into our thirties, we were satisfied that we ould likely never marry. Then came Terrence.

Terrence courted my sister in an impassioned tornado and married her after only three weeks. During that time she had been completely transformed by their affair. She began an average middle-aged bookkeeper and became a romantic heroine to make a Barbara Cartland proud. I watched the transformation with awe, and then with envy.

The late night that a drunken Terrence stumbled into my first floor home by mistake, I only wanted a little taste of what my sister had. Had I foreseen the bitter shrieking matches to come — the slammed doors, the hatred — I would have shoved Terrence back into the hallway and carried him up the stairs if necessary. Ultimately, it became too much for Terrence, and he abandoned my sister. She’d had no word of him until yesterday, when a lawyer called to say Terrence was dead.

I glanced up from my doorstep reverie when I heard a car approach. Joanie emerged slowly from her ancient Buick and turned to face me. Her tear-stained cheeks were no surprise, but there was something else. The old, familiar hatred was gone from her eyes. Her gaze was instead hopeless and, dare I say, apologetic? I went to her and proffered the hat. She didn’t even glance at it. She just took my face in her hands and whispered, “I’m so sorry, Janice. I’m so, so sorry . . . all these years I’ve cost us.”

“But what? Why? What’s happened, Joanie?”

“So many women.” Her voice broke, but she went on. “There were so many women at the funeral. And the police. Those women lost everything, Joanie. Terry conned them all. What you did? You saved me. I’m so sorry.”