RECOMMENDED READING
Play On! BY JUDY DEARLOVE
READ Fiction AN EXCERPT | RCWMS Press | November 2019
She smacked Tom’s side of the bed with her pillow. It had been ten years, and Maxine was still angry. They’d been married half a century. Then one night he died—in his sleep. Not just any night, but this very night ten years ago. His heart simply stopped. No warning. No suffering—at least not for him. It was precisely the way everyone here at the Foothills Retirement Community wanted to go. It was the way she wanted to go. But she was still furious with him for going and not telling her, for going without a sign or a sound. She threw off the blankets and swung her feet over the edge of the bed. No point in 62
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lying on her half of a double bed. Far better to watch the sun rise over the mountains that surrounded Tucson than to watch that blasted clock. Even without her glasses she could read the extra-large numbers: 4:00 AM. She rocked herself to a standing position. Her knees cracked with arthritis, but they held. She waited a moment for her hips and back to realign themselves before pulling on Tom’s navy blue bathrobe. She patted the bedside table for her glasses. Instead, her fingers closed around the silver frame of Tom’s photo. Clutching the photo to her chest, she marched through her condo to the sliding glass patio door, tugged
it open, and stepped outside. Neither the moon nor the stars were out. Even the mountains that guarded Tucson’s northeastern perimeter were barely perceptible, black shadows against a black backdrop. The darkness was broken only by the spotlight Fred Grosskopf insisted on using to illuminate his hundred-year-old saguaro. Thankfully, her
