The Widower and other Short Stories

By Debra Milligan

Debra Milligan presents a quintet of short stories about love and growth, the catalysts for life that translate well into fiction. Each story is set in a different era, with conflicts and resolutions that transcend time.

The Widower is Gerhardt Schildt, a man who must learn to love, after the death of his wife. His life, literally, depends on it.

Set in the early 1900s in Philadelphia, this story will bring tears to your eyes as it brings justice to the heart of a man who has yet to truly love the woman he’d once called his wife.

The Widower is a moment in time that will change time forever for Gerhardt Schildt.

Sound of Goodbye reveals the ending of a love that never began. A girl becomes a woman in the leaving of a boy who never became a man. Set in New England in 1962, this tale speaks of a time when a woman had fewer choices in life. This young woman, inevitably, makes hers wisely, and moves toward a life of independence.

Rainy Dreams tells the improbable love of two people who meet by chance: a divorced woman wounded by love and a single younger man who tends to love like a garden. A bit of a 1990’s tale, this short story finds love in an unusual place, and in a mocking way. That way teaches a teacher new respect for the architecture of romance and roses — and how dreams of love can become rainy dreams.

You can’t run from love, but that didn’t stop the young woman in The Highway from trying. The young man who seeks her heart has his own way of sending a message to her, one that she won’t tear up and throw away.

The Highway is about the road that led away from love and the road that led back to it.

The Christmas Lunch sets the table for friendship between two young women. One female has found true love after betrayal; the other female has to find the courage to risk betrayal in order to know the meaning of true love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debra Milligan
• Release date: Feb 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370991280

Debra Milligan

Debra Milligan is a novelist, essayist, poet, and short story writer. She is fluent in French and has varied interests in the fine arts, architecture, history of all kinds, music, horses, hounds, the Golden Age of Hollywood, quilting, fashion, and gardening.

Book preview

The Widower

and

Other Short Stories

By

Debra Milligan

Copyright 2018 Debra Milligan

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

The Widower

Rainy Dreams

Sound of Goodbye

The Highway

The Christmas Lunch

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The Widower

He lived alone. He’d always lived alone. Now, however, the aloneness had become intolerable, after his wife had died, late one blustery night in late November. The fact that the man had been married for a decade had not insured that he’d shared his life. Indeed, his life became even more self-centered after he’d taken his vows.

Cornelia had understood, in her own meek, selfless way. Gerhardt had loved her enough to marry her, or so she’d told herself, countless times. Their love had not produced a child, but she believed it had been her fault, this barrenness that had also doomed their marriage. She died, heart-broken, of an illness that was undiagnosed, in a bed that had not seen her husband sleep with her for months.

At length, he changed the bedsheets, the day after he buried his wife, next to her mother. That woman had been a fish-wife. She’d not deserved the sweet, loving daughter who had taken care of her, this widowed hag who had finally died, old and bitter, after blaming her only child, this devoted daughter, with foul, scathing language, for the misery of her own life. The mother had given birth to this kitten but was unable to love her; she’d then watched her husband die, young, and she’d become a professional widow. The routine had never