Adella

A Story from Dahlia Man

"It was the 1930's in Baldwin, a suburb of New York City. I'd been seeing Adella for a few years when I asked her to marry me. She told me she had to make a trip to Buffalo to settle things with her husband. I never knew she was married. She returned two weeks later to tell me that she had patched things up with her husband and was going back to him.

After that, I only dated married women for a long time. Then I married Dot, the love of my life. We had grown up together. Dot contracted lymphatic cancer. She died after we had been married only twelve years.

I remarried and moved to California. Not long after that, Florence and I had a big fight and I went back east to visit my mother. While I was there, I decided to see Adella. She was in Florida by now. It was there that I met my daughter. It was just as if we had never parted. Her husband had been killed in a freak accident on a shrimping boat that he owned. I could've stayed with her and taken over the shrimping business, but I had a good job working for the state of California, so I went back to Florence.

Hardly a day goes by that I don't think of Adella though. It's not likely that she's even still alive, but she's still twenty years old in my memory. Memories are all you have when you're this old."