Free Baby Be Mine by Diane Fanning Page A

Monica was willing to listen with sympathy to Lisa’s endless litany of problems. “She’d get in trouble with management because she’d be talking. She couldn’t focus on her work.”
    She obviously could not focus on nurturing her marriage, either. In 1998, it ended. Lisa had no more tricks up her sleeve to hold it together. She knew she could no longer claim pregnancy and bind Carl to her side. He was awake and aware—he saw her lies coming before they crossed her lips.
    Carl left with all four children and settled in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Lisa filed divorce papers in Deming on June 30. Carl was served on July 3. The marriage was over for good.
    The Sixth Judicial District Court in Luna County granted the divorce on August 6. The ruling gave joint custody of the children to both parents, but granted physical custody to Lisa and visitation rights to Carl.
    Once the legal process was behind her, Lisa moved to Kansas to live with her mother. By then, Judy and Richard Boman had divorced, too. Judy had a new husband, Danny Shaughnessy. They lived on a farm outside of the town of Lyndon—population 1,038. There they raised cows, geese,chickens, pigs, sheep and goats. They made their own sausage, tended a strawberry patch and cultivated a large vegetable garden. They did everything they could to live off the land.
    According to one of Lisa’s friends, Judy built up a negative reputation with many in her community. Most of the time, it was easy to get along with her. Then, for no discernible reason, she’d flip. Without warning, a few women who thought she was a friend were startled to hear outrageous stories about themselves blanketing the community—all handwoven by Judy Shaughnessy.
    In Kansas in 1999, Lisa Boman met Kevin Montgomery. In a few short years, she tore his normal small-town world apart.

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    M elvern, Kansas, just off of Interstate Highway 35 between Kansas City and Wichita, was settled in 1868. Not many people knew that the town was named after the Malvern Hills in Scotland—a nine-mile-long landmark that humped above the flat Malvern Plain. An unfortunate error in the original town filing spelled the name with an “e” instead of an “a“—and obscured the connection between the two places. The hills across the ocean were filled with prehistoric sites and were home of one of this new town’s founders.
    By 1871, Melvern consisted of 100 people living in twenty houses, along with a small sawmill, three dry goods stores, a drugstore and a blacksmith shop. The town didn’t grow until rail arrived in the mid-1880s. At that point, the population soared to 491 and remained fairly stable thereafter.
    Many small towns the size of Melvern went into a spiral of decay and ennui in the social upheaval of the 1960s andnever recovered. Fortunately for this small village, there were folks who cared enough to make plans for improvement and follow through on their commitments.
    In 1988, thirty folks gathered for a town hall meeting at the local extension office. They divided into five or six work groups and got busy ascertaining the town’s needs. The two top items on the list were a grocery store and a community building. They couldn’t do much about a private enterprise, but they got busy fulfilling their dream of a community center in 2000, accumulating money with a series of fundraisers. When they reached $30,000, they found out about the possibility of funding through the KAN STEP program in the state’s commerce department and secured a $340,000 grant.
    It was an awesome accomplishment for a town of its size, but the people of Melvern did not stop there. Next, they tackled Jones Park.
    The Jones brothers passed away in the 1950s, leaving behind the Jones Fund as their legacy. Initially, the money was used to provide college scholarships and meet medical expenses for needy families in a three-county area. As the funds grew, the mission