Free WIDOW by Billie Sue Mosiman

bought at the local Woolworth's store. She had to wash them out every night in the hall sink at the boarding house, then hang them in the window of her room to dry overnight. After a month she had saved two hundred dollars toward the purchase of the car, and the muscle tone was coming back in her arms and legs. She stood five-foot-six, weighed a hundred and twenty. Her waist needed a little work, had to get those inches off, so she switched from sandwiches to salads and cups of yogurt. She still had to have her hair cut and styled.
    Every night when she returned to her depressing room with the peeling cabbage-rose wallpaper and the veneered chest of drawers, she stood looking at herself critically in the strip of mirror nailed to the closet door. With the overhead light on, she examined her face for telltale signs of aging. No wrinkles. No deep crease lines yet. She was blessed with good bone structure that would shield her from looking her age for a few years to come. Her hair was thick and lush, but she worked at it, brushing the shoulder-length tresses a hundred times every night before bed. She washed it with beer and lemon. She used the best conditioners. It was beginning to shine like wet slate rock, and have a bounce of health when she flung her head.
    She sucked in her little round tummy and sighed with despair. Had to get that flat again. Do more sit-ups and bend-overs. Her buttocks had not sagged, driven by gravity earthward—not yet. They rode high without leaving a smooth line sloping to her thighs. She soaked her feet in Epsom salts, rubbed lotion into them, trimmed her nails. She couldn't do much about her hands yet. At any time when they weren't working inside rubber gloves with cleaning solutions, she found them slipping into her mouth where she gnawed at the stubby nails. Maybe if she dipped her fingertips in Tabasco sauce? It was a thought. If that didn't work, she would simply go to a salon and have them put nail-wraps on.
    She had to be perfect. She could not, would not, dared not be a maid the rest of her life. She could not continue seeing Andrew—or any other male children—who tore at her heart, and dazed her with fresh sorrow every time she looked at them. It would kill her. Or cause her to kill someone else.
    It was frightening and awesome in its intensity, but she had trouble being around men now. It had started with the job, the same as her reaction to the children. When there was a man in the house, she fought an urge to jump him, to wrestle him to the floor, and plunge a knife through his heart. Any man, it didn't matter, but usually she felt this sudden craving to destroy when the man was a father of small children. She had less animosity toward the father of the teenagers in the house where she cleaned once a week.
    But still it was there, that feeling of losing something that held the world in check, losing it to the point that she might pick up something and hurl it or smash it . . . or stab it clear through flesh and bone.
    It was crazy, she knew that. But it made perfect sense at the same time. Fathers were irresponsible. They never loved their children as much as mothers did. They were stick figures who moved through a family with the role pulled over their heads, but not their hearts. They could not be trusted. They might do something irredeemable at any moment. Kay suspected all of them of child abuse or incest or hidden motives aimed toward children that involved sexual gratification or violence.
    Once she stood on the stairway leading down from the balcony in Andrew's house and saw his father enter, a briefcase tucked under one arm. He scooped little Andrew up into his free arm and laughed in his face. She stood stock-still, her breath caught tight as if inside a steel cage, while she watched the father carry the boy through to the living room sofa and dump him unceremoniously into the cushions. Andrew laughed, thrilled, but Kay knew in his heart he must have been terrified. So high