Free Legacy by Larissa Behrendt

routine, not because she was interested in finding someone but because Tony would always take the front part of the paper and she would be left with little to read other than the sport, business section, crossword, comics and classifieds (which included the personals section). She got into the habit of reading the ads, a guilty pleasure, finding them pitiable in their desperation but strangely spirited in their optimism.
    How brave some people are, she thought, to actually put themselves out in the public, to advertise themselves, like shampoo or luxury cars:
    Woman professional, university educated. Bored by the earnest young men surrounding her. Back to square one in this Snakes and Ladders game of love. Bruised but still attractive.
    Some she found funny, revealing the shortcomings that perhaps explained why the person placing the ad was so lonely.
    Athletic male professional (doctor), not quite 30, seeks beautiful (preferably blonde) girlfriend. My luxury home, fast car and incredible personality await. Needs to have the qualities of a good wife and the proclivities of a whore. Women with flat chests and flat shoes needn’t reply.
    And often, Beth Ann reflected on how her own might read.
    Woman worn dull with neglect seeks escape so she no longer feels insignificant.
    It had been a long time since she had felt any optimism about love. To find the last time it had swept over her she would have to go back decades, back to the time when she had first met Tony.
    How young she’d been then. So fresh, so heady with the freedom of having escaped an unhappy family life, of being caught up in the spirit of change, of being part of something that seemed to really make a difference, part of what felt like history.
    She would tell the story of how Tony had courted her, had proposed. She had refused him once, and then refused him again. When he asked her a third time she relented. ‘You won’t be sorry,’ he told her, holding her tight. ‘I promise I will make you happy.’
    But like most stories, there was much more to it than that.
    Her father, Patrick Gibson, had married her mother, Virginia, in Stanwell Park on the coast just south of Sydney. He’d been a coal miner and she’d wanted a better life, one that didn’t eventuate after she became pregnant with Beth Ann’s oldest sister. Beth Ann was their third and youngest child – all girls. Her mother grew more resentful each time a new daughter arrived, as though each child sucked more life out of her. Her father had only wanted a son and pretty much as soon as they were born dismissed his girls as disappointments.
    What Beth Ann’s parents loved most was alcohol – her mother would become spiteful under its influence; her father, more melancholy, enjoying his wife’s unhappiness, finding her misery amusing. These domestic dynamics made for a house that was full of bitterness and emotional cruelty. It was perhaps not surprising that as her sisters became older they sought attention elsewhere. Both were pretty with their blonde hair, blue eyes, sprinkling of freckles and sun-kissed tanned skin. Quintessential golden girls in a beachside town, they were both popular and, with little supervision from their parents, wilful and wild. ‘Those Gibson girls’ her sisters were referred to in unflattering tones. Beth Ann was ‘the nice one’, ‘the quiet one’.
    Beth Ann had always felt uncomfortable with the stern glances from the older women in the town that her sisters would brush off with a flick of their hair. She was not as rebellious as them, was shyer with boys, avoided their company and attention. She would rather find a quiet place to read than sit on the beach and flirt. Over summer while her sisters painted their nails, went to parties and changed boyfriends, she would spend her time at the library and reading aloud to the elderly residents at the local nursing home. She became friends with some of