Chapter Thirteen
She would have lost the business despite her best efforts had it not been for the town’s people. It was a small town and everyone was well aware of her circumstances. Every business in town had a donation jar near the cash register. Friends and acquaintances alike responded with various fund drives. However, even with this kindness, by the time Bobby died she was destitute and deeply in debt.
Once Bobby was gone, Etty soon discovered that married women didn’t care to be friends with single women. They especially didn’t care to socialize with single women that their husbands found attractive. Since the majority of friends they had made since moving to Cholla were married couples, Etty no longer had what she would consider friends. She had many acquaintances and the people that came in the diner treated her well, but she no longer had what she would consider girl friends.
Moreover, after Bobby died some of the men that had been their friends seemed to want to be more than friends, but after she reminded them that they still had wives they backed off. Although she tended to flirt with the customers, she had no boyfriends in the traditional sense and she just considered the flirting good business. A while after Bobby died, she tried dating but it never worked out. Etty was looking for a husband and father for her son, but it seemed the men she met were looking for a one-night stand. She couldn’t stand the thought of becoming known as the town trollop so she just stopped dating. Truth is there were very few eligible men of her age in the tiny town of Cholla anyway.
She had settled into working at the restaurant and raising her son who was the apple of her eye. She helped with his homework, attended all school functions and when he started playing football she never missed a game. She was determined that her son would get an education and have a better life than she had. However, after Bobby died she couldn’t see, for the life of her, how she was going to manage that.
Etty could never tell Rick about her former life. She thought she may someday be able to tell him about portions of it, but she wasn’t sure she could tell him about the rape and knew for certain she could never tell him that she had been a prostitute. Etty had once thought how wonderful it would be if you could just delete parts of your life. Sort of like with a memory chip, just delete files in the middle and gain additional room at the end for new information. She hoped that maybe it had happened now. She had more room for memory space at the end, thanks to the ball, but what she couldn’t figure out was how to erase the files she no longer wanted.
She knew Rick loved her and she was sure that he would forgive her past, but she was afraid of was that it would never be the same again. Rick had grown up on the ranch with two parents that loved him and had everything a person needs for a good life. To Etty it was as if he had led the American dream. He had never been far from the ranch except for the two years he spent in the army, and life on the ranch to her way of thinking, must have been idyllic. She was sure that nothing bad had happened to him in his entire life. There was no way he could comprehend what it was like growing up in her situation or what it did to you.
Another part of her not wanting him to know about her former life was that she was sure it would hurt him. She knew him well enough to know that he would spend a lot of time thinking about what she had been through and fretting over it. He would want to do something to make it all better and knowing that there was nothing he could do, would eat at him. The last thing in the world Sarah wanted was to hurt Rick.