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Back The Ursulina Save as PDF
Chapters (45)
  1. I know you'll never forgive me...
  2. Part One - Your Father
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Chapter Six
  9. Chapter Seven
  10. Chapter Eight
  11. Chapter Nine
  12. Chapter Ten
  13. Chapter Eleven
  14. Chapter Twelve
  15. Chapter Thirteen
  16. Chapter Fourteen
  17. Chapter Fifteen
  18. Chapter Sixteen
  19. Chapter Seventeen
  20. Chapter Eighteen
  21. Chapter Nineteen
  22. Chapter Twenty
  23. Part Two - Your Mother
  24. Chapter Twenty-One
  25. Chapter Twenty-Two
  26. Chapter Twenty-Three
  27. Chapter Twenty-Four
  28. Chapter Twenty-Five
  29. Chapter Twenty-Six
  30. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  31. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  32. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  33. Chapter Thirty
  34. Chapter Thirty-One
  35. Chapter Thirty-Two
  36. Chapter Thirty-Three
  37. Chapter Thirty-Four
  38. Chapter Thirty-Five
  39. Chapter Thirty-Six
  40. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  41. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  42. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  43. Chapter Forty
  44. Chapter Forty-One
  45. About the Author

Sundays were typically movie night at the bar, and that always drew a crowd. Yesterday, they’d shown Trading Places, which Ricky didn’t want to miss because of Jamie Lee Curtis and her boobs. I’d used my cold as an excuse to skip it, but Ricky and I had also had a big fight before he went off to see the movie. I’d lost my cool and said things I never meant to say out loud.

Like using the D word—divorce—for the first time.

It had been almost two years since Ricky got fired from the mine for assaulting his supervisor. With no unemployment, we were barely scraping by, and we’d only made the December mortgage payment because my dad gave me two hundred dollars. January was coming and the mortgage was due again, and Ricky was no closer to finding work. However, the fight was less about him and less about money than it was about me. I was struggling with Big Things. Who I was. The mistakes I’d made. What I needed to do to reclaim my life. More and more, I was thinking about a future without Ricky, but the time to say so wasn’t in the midst of an argument while we were both drunk and angry. So that Monday night, with it being Christmas Eve and all, I decided to stop at the bar and see if we could make peace, at least for the holidays.

Despite my good intentions, though, I didn’t get a chance to see him. Another call came in before I even made it back to the 126, so I had to change my plans. This time, the call came from Sandra Thoreau.

I usually heard from Sandra a couple of times a month about vandalism at her house. She was the lead plaintiff in a sexual harassment lawsuit that two dozen women had filed against the Langford copper mine, and given that the mine was the largest employer in the county, Sandra wasn’t exactly popular. The men around here made sure she knew it. She’d had obscene graffiti scrawled on her house so many times that she didn’t even bother to remove it anymore. In fact, she’d been adding to it herself by painting anatomically correct drawings of some of the lesser-endowed mine workers, with their names attached. Her motto was to give as good as she got.