Vera always wore a pair of granny spectacles that rested on the bridge of her red and veiny nose. The hundreds of tiny purple veins came from years of drinking “occasional” glasses of sherry and frequent shots of J&B scotch. She drank mostly out of boredom and more now than she had in the past. Even Vera noticed how her drinking had increased. She guessed it was due to her becoming more and more uninterested and listless about life. She often wondered why over the past few years a gray curtain seemed to have dropped down in front of her. Why, the first word she said every morning when she woke was “damn.” Vera never used to wake up and say that. She used to be happy in the morning. It was the start of a brand-new day.

Now she said damn.

Vera missed her dear husband, Norville. More now than she had in the past. Perhaps that was the root of her unhappiness. Prolonged life without Norville—it had been almost fifty years—might very well be the cause of her depression. Well, it made sense, didn’t it? For one thing, she and Norville had done so many things together. Their daily breakfast ritual, going to the movies, reading in bed before going to sleep. The simple life. It was so much fun. And Norville was so funny! He could make Vera Bundle laugh louder and longer than anyone else she knew. But for so long now, Norville had been just plain dead Norville, a pile of bones in a beat-up casket in the cold, hard ground out there in Memorial Park Cemetery.

“I know this is a touchy subject, Vera, but you haven’t laughed or done much of anything since Norville passed,” said her friend Esther Wigton over tea one afternoon at the Conrad Hotel. The Conrad was the only hotel in Steubenville that served high tea at four P.M. “Norville died fifty years ago, Vera. Isn’t that time enough to mourn someone? You should have moved on years ago.”

Vera sighed. She had heard that speech maybe a thousand times from Esther.

Vera Bundle was retired now. She used to teach geography at PS 13, the grammar school in downtown Steubenville. Vera knew she would miss teaching after she retired, but enough was enough. At her farewell lunch she told the crowd as much. Actually it wasn’t exactly a crowd. Only four friends came to Vera’s retirement party.

“I think forty-five years is plenty of teaching for one person,” she told them.

The four friends nodded.

At the end of her short speech Vera thanked her friends for her going-away present. It was a Timex wristwatch they had all chipped in to buy her. “It’s something I will always cherish,” she said.

The four friends nodded.

Vera loved being retired. She finally had the time to concentrate on furthering her own education in her own way. It was something she had been doing part-time her entire life. Now she would be able to do it full-time. What that meant was she could study her Encyclopaedia Britannicas and National Geographics all day, all afternoon, and all night, if she so desired.