The Melody Lingers On Read Free Page B

limousine. They’d held hands
all the way down. Neither one of them had gone to college. She worked as a sales clerk in Macy’s and he had a job in construction.
    Her mother didn’t want her to marry me, he thought. In school I’d always been in trouble for having fights with other kids. Too quick to turn my hands into fists. A nasty temper. Her
mother was right but Judy calmed me down. I never was mad at her, not for one single minute. If I started yelling, like about a driver who cut me off, she would order me to stop it. Tell me I was
acting like a child.
    To both of their regret they never had been blessed with kids.
    Ranger reached over and with a gentle stroke ran his calloused fingertips across his wife’s forehead. You were always smarter than me, he thought. You were the one who told me I’d be
better off getting a job with the city, that jobs in construction came and went. You were the reason I got to be a repairman on the Long Island Rail Road. I worked from one end of the island to the
other. You said it fitted my nickname. My father started calling me Ranger when I was a kid because I was always out of range of where I was supposed to be.
    Judy always told him how handsome he was. That’s a joke, he thought. He was a short, bulky guy with big ears and bushy eyebrows, even though he tried to keep them trimmed.
    Judy. Judy. Judy.
    Anger welled up in the depths of Ranger’s being as he thought about why Judy had had the first stroke two years ago after they learned that the money they had invested in the Bennett Fund
had disappeared. Two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars that they were going to use to buy a condo in Florida. Money they had saved so carefully over the years. The condo they had seen was a real
buy. An old lady who owned it had died and her family wanted to get rid of it furnished.
    Judy had loved the way it was decorated. “Much nicer than I would have figured out how to do it,” she said. “We’ll give away everything here in the apartment. It’s
not worth the expense of getting a U-Haul. Oh, Ranger, I’m so ready to give up my job and get down to Florida and be in the sun. What’s nice is with no mortgage to pay and having both
our pensions and social security, if we’re careful we won’t have to worry about money.”
    And at just that time the money in the Bennett Fund had disappeared, and that was the end of buying the condo. A few weeks later Judy had the first stroke and he had watched her exhausting
herself trying to keep up with the exercises to try to strengthen her left arm and leg. She tried to keep him from hearing her crying at night but of course he heard her.
    It was Parker Bennett’s fault that their lives had been destroyed. A lot of people didn’t believe that he’d committed suicide by taking a dive off that fancy sailboat of his.
Ranger didn’t believe that that jerk had jumped in the water. In one of the newspapers after Bennett disappeared, Ranger had seen his picture; he was sitting behind an antique, rich-guy desk
in his office. Bennett’s way of offing himself would be to sit behind that desk all dressed up like he is in that picture and get drunk on some single-malt scotch, then shoot himself, Ranger
thought.
    Our money helped pay for that fancy office.
    And Judy had been so depressed and so sick that she had given up. He knew that was why she’d had the second stroke yesterday.
    He knew she was dying.
    Don’t die, Judy. Please don’t die.
    The heart monitor beside the bed began to go off. It was a loud shrieking sound. In just a few seconds doctors and nurses were rushing into the room. One of them began pounding on Judy’s
chest.
    Ranger could see that the blip on the screen that had been showing the heartbeats was no longer there. Now it was moving in a straight line.
    He stared straight ahead. I can’t live without her, he thought numbly.
    He felt a hand on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Cole,” the doctor was saying.