A New Season
by
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CHAPTER ONE
“We’re going to die anyway. Let’s get it over with.”
George Konert scanned the room. He noted the trite combination of light blue walls and pink accents in the curtains and pictures. The use of baby colors had to have been some decorator’s ill-conceived attempt at turning an ordinary waiting room into a shrine to motherhood. Still, he had to tip his hat to the unknown talent. He, or she, understood the market value of ambiance. Virtually every chair that lined the walls, each presumably just as hard and uncomfortable as his, was filled with laughing, talkative women in various stages of rotundity.
He and his wife, Catherine, were sitting side-by-side when he took a sheepish glance at her. They were in the waiting room as a result of her positive mammogram, but she was the one who was enduring the ordeal far better than he. That made him feel both weak and uncomfortable. While she appeared to be placidly reading a vintage magazine, it bugged him no end that his stomach was responding to his wife’s predicament with a gut-filled dread that had made its appearance the first moment he’d learned about her abnormal test.
Fifteen years earlier, his first wife had died of breast cancer. While George assumed a jury would excuse him for not jumping in and catering to Catherine’s needs, he was more harsh and less forgiving of himself for not wanting to face it. During his first marriage, he’d thrived on Grace’s guidance and directions. After she left him, he had eventually healed, but not until he’d spent far too many years scratching away in his garden looking for solace. During that time he’d been wary of all human contact, avoiding it whenever possible by staying alert for the slightest movement toward him and fleeing to safety at the mildest of advances. Then Catherine entered his life, and he regained all the richness he’d given up. Now, thinking of an existence without her, he wasn’t sure he could ever cope again. In fact, just the thought of another bleak future filled him with terror. .
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About the Author
Raymond L. Paul was born in
Immediately following graduation in 1958, he passed up an opportunity to play minor league baseball in the Dodger farm system choosing instead to marry his college sweetheart and begin a career with Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company. Fifty-one years later he is still smitten with Jo Marie and proud of his ongoing relationship with Mass Mutual.
Ray’s writing career had its genesis in college where he eschewed his business electives for creative writing classes. Though this period primed his heart for creative writing, fighting for a toehold in the financial services industry and being a good father to three daughters precluded any serious involvement. His hiatus from fiction writing lasted almost forty years.
Fourteen years ago Ray finally reached a comfortable stage where the demands on his time and energy were diminished. Their older daughters had moved away and started families of their own, and he and Jo Marie had weathered the crisis of losing their youngest daughter to meningitis. With his golf scores soaring and time on his hands, he needed a new challenge. Two college writing classes and a couple of workshops later, he had found a new avocation. With the first click of the keyboard, he began writing himself toward retirement.
In the past seven years, Ray has written Cabbage Requiem, the sequel, Between the Rows and now A New Season, the finale of the George Konert trilogy. In addition, he has published Shards, an eclectic collection of his best short stories, some twenty-two of which were previously published in a variety of literary journals and magazines. Ray also teaches writing classes at the Center for Learning in Retirement at