Sally Pfoutz

When Evening Falls Sally Pfoutz

A woman's past and present aren't concurrent, but Lord sometimes it felt that way to Patsy when she thought back. Walking out on her family was the worst thing she ever did and she could never take that back, not that single act, not the years that followed. They blame her and they have a right to, but who's to say they would have turned out better if she had stayed? What happens to a woman who leaves her husband for another man-the very man whose life her husband saved during WWII? And what becomes of her three children who grow up without a mother so that she can care for another man's child? There she was back in 1963, married to Royal, a handsome, successful lawyer. They lived in a beautiful house in Lexington, Kentucky, with their three children, Betsy, Cindy and Jody. Patsy had met Royal when she was working for a senator in Washington, D. C., and he was recovering from war injuries at Walter Reed. She loved being a wife and mother but she missed her career and she had a hard time making friends with the women in her neighborhood. Then Royal's war-buddy, Charlie and his little motherless daughter, Jackie, came to visit and everything changed for Patsy. Charlie admired her and paid attention to her while Royal took her for granted, she thought. As for tiny little Jackie, how could she grow up without a mother, especially with the war-wounded Charlie as a father? Patsy couldn't stopping thinking about being a little girl, herself, living for a time in San Antonio, Texas, where her mother Gussie was getting treatment at a TB sanatarium-that would be way back in 1927 when Patsy was just 7 years-old. For the rest of her life Patsy would remember San Antonio with an ache and a love, as the last place she was happy. Not so much for its sultry Texas ways, the palm trees and low slung adobe houses so unlike Kentucky's brick and mortar and stormy leafy overhung skies. In fact, the gritty rock and soil landscape of Texas, dotted with brilliant yellow cactus flowers under a pale canopy of sky, was the flip-side of the blue-green stretches of home. Yet it was in San Antonio that she last cast hope like streamers about her and each one said, Please don't let her die. Please don't let her die. It was surely all that mattered, for a child couldn't be without a mother, could she? Patsy's story shifts between the end of her life, in 1994, and the years before, when she fell in love with two men and left one for the other. There is much regret, both of her marriages end painfully, yet there is also reconciliation and forgiveness and Patsy is remembered fondly. As her daughter Jackie says tearfully to Patsy's adult children from her marriage to Royal, "She used to say your father saved my father's life. Well, she saved my life, I'm sure of it. She had this incredible strength to be pleasant when the worst things happened."