A Love to Last Forever

By Sharlaine Southland Lardge

Kelsey Somerset is a shy young girl just finishing high school who falls in love with her best friends brother whom she has had a crush on forever. He is a young man in college who is destined to enter the pro-football world and he reciprocates her love. As it sometimes does fate steps in and changes outcomes and futures. It is a story of love, tragedy, loss, lies, challenges, and being brave enough to find happiness once again. Kelsey is catapulted through the turbulent times of the sixties and seventies - the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King and the war in Viet Nam with its aftermath on people. Through it all she remains firm and steadfast in her love and endurance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499034066

Sharlaine Southland Lardge

Sharlaine Southland Lardge was born in 1950 and grew up in the sixties and seventies in Meriden, Connecticut. She has been happily married to Ronald Cedric Lardge since 1996. She currently lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Sharlaine is the mother of three daughters. She has nine grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. Although working in the accounting field for most of her life she has always enjoyed writing. The stories are there waiting to come out and now that she has retired she is bringing them to life. This is her first book with a second one in the making.

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Sharlaine Southland Lardge.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014910455

ISBN:      Hardcover         978-1-4990-3409-7

                Softcover           978-1-4990-3410-3

                eBook               978-1-4990-3406-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 06/05/2014

Xlibris LLC

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1 Recollections From The Past

Chapter 2 Graduation And The Hospital

Chapter 3 Love Is In The Air

Chapter 4 A Change

Chapter 5 Homecoming

Chapter 6 Life Goes On But It’s Never The Same

Chapter 7 Another Spring

Chapter 8 Fear

Chapter 9 A New Life

Chapter 10 Unforeseen Occurances

This book is

dedicated to my family. First and foremost to my husband Ronald who is my very own love to last forever; second to my three daughters Shari, Collene, and Patricia; third to my nine grandchildren Jasmine, Jamie, Gloria, Matthew, Jessica, Abigail, Kyle, Joshua, and Taylor. Finally to my great-grandchildren, who are increasing in leaps and bounds, currently at nine. I hope you will always put Jehovah first in your life and your family second. I love all of you. Love each other and stand by each other.

PROLOGUE

Sitting in the surgery waiting room at the Meriden/Wallingford hospital was depressing. I stared at the white walls with the red electrical outlets. What was the purpose of bright red electrical outlets? The chairs were a beige vinyl and not so comfortable to sit in. There were no pictures to brighten the scenery. There were a few photographs of famous doctors; I guess they were ones who got the hospital on the map, so to speak. They all looked very intelligent and very boring. I wasn’t bored though, I was worried sick. How had it come down to this, waiting in a waiting room for a doctor to give me either bad news or good news? There would be no in-between, no mediocre news.

I looked across the room at Mom sitting in one of the chairs, pretending to read a magazine. She wasn’t fooling anyone, I could tell by her eyes that she was worried too and wasn’t really seeing the page she had the magazine opened to.

Every time the door opened I nearly jumped out of my seat, terrified it would be the surgeon, terrified of what he would say. How long had it been? It seemed like hours although it could have been only minutes. Time seemed to be at a standstill. I think I was on the verge of shock and seemed to drift in and out of sanity. One minute I was waiting patiently and the next I would be overcome with fear and trepidation. How much longer could I sit here and wait.

I felt rather than saw movement and realized Mom had come to sit by me and she took my hand in hers.

Kelsey, you need to be strong she whispered. He will make it; he’s not going to leave you.

I felt the tears welling up in my eyes, the burning tears that I couldn’t hold in anymore. I loved him so much, I just couldn’t lose him, I couldn’t take any more pain in my life. I had had too much pain and it was time for the pain to end. We had all had too much pain.

Suddenly the door opened and a man dressed in white entered the room. I immediately recognized him as the doctor who had done the original evaluation and called in the surgeon. His expression gave nothing away, it was serious, nondescript. My heart seemed to beat out of my chest and my breath stopped as he approached me, dreading what he was going to say to me. I looked at Mom and back at him. Mom squeezed my hand tighter as I trembled in anticipation of his words.

CHAPTER 1

RECOLLECTIONS FROM THE PAST

I remember well my childhood home, the house I grew up in. Mom told me I wasn’t actually living there until I was five months old, but as far as I was concerned that was always my home. It wasn’t what was considered a big house, although it always looked quite large to me, sitting at the top of the hill on Hickory Lane. It was a very old house as were many houses in Elton, Connecticut. Mom told me it was over 200 years old. You could hear the house creak and groan in the night like someone was walking around. It had scared me in my younger years, since I had a wild imagination and could see in my mind all kinds of ghosts and goblins walking around at night, but I learned that it was quite normal for old houses to make those noises. It was just the wood settling down for a rest. I read up on it and learned that it’s because heat expands, lack of heat contracts. What’s happening is that the heat of the day expands everything just slightly, such a small amount that you can’t see it. However, at night, when it’s cooler, and the heat is bleeding off, the house contracts, rubbing boards together, compressing them, until they slip just a little, causing the creak. All construction ages, settles, rises, flexes, twists, tilts, sags and becomes stressed.

I soon learned to live with the creaks and groans and rarely heard them anymore.

I was always an avid reader and loved to read anything and everything I could get my hands on. My favorite author was Charles Dickens and I had read everything he wrote. I also loved mysteries and love stories. I even liked to read history and science books, although my best subject in school was always Math. Working with numbers was something I was always good at. I was pretty smart and my teachers told me I had an IQ of 153 which is considered genius level. They told me I should be a straight A student; although now in my last year of school I wasn’t getting the best grades in anything except Bookkeeping.

I hated school, always did. Now don’t get me wrong, I loved to learn. I just hated school. Maybe it was because I was tremendously shy and never had a lot of friends. I never knew how to approach and reach out to people to start conversations. The only friends I ever really had were those who reached out to me. I was never very popular although I don’t think anyone ever really disliked me except maybe in my younger years. I was just too shy – in fact whenever we had company come to the house, even close relatives, I ran upstairs and hid under Mom’s bed.

I remember much of my younger years, although sometimes I wish I didn’t have such an intense memory. I wish I had the selective memory some people seemed to have, or at least claimed to have, to only remember what was good and forget the bad. However, that wasn’t me. I remembered it all in vivid detail. One of my memories was of when I was only two and half years old. Mom put me in ballet lessons. I hated it! I was too young to really know what we were doing. The exercises hurt and it was very boring when the older more accomplished kids came in and danced and we had to watch their techniques. I would sit there and try to listen. Just a lot of complicated words I couldn’t even begin to understand. Things like pointe, allegro, derriere. Who cared? Our teacher’s name was Mrs. Karsavina. She was originally from Russia but spoke excellent English. She had mousy brown hair always pulled back in a severe bun at the nap of her neck. The hair was pulled back so much that it appeared to be pulling right out of her scalp. I had no interest in ballet. All I wanted to do is go home and play. I would sit there trying to figure out how I could get out of there. I knew. I would wet my pants, and then Mommy would take me home. And it always worked until eventually Mommy got wise and pulled me out of the ballet classes. But they were soon replaced.

I’m not sure if it was because Mom always wanted me to learn as much as possible, or if it was because she wanted me to break out of my shyness, or maybe she just didn’t want me home under foot all the time, I never could figure that one out. It might have been a combination of all three. The result was that I was seldom home – I was in the Girl Scouts, the Girls Club, different camps during the summer, cooking lessons, tap dancing lessons, gymnastic lessons, swimming lessons, guitar lessons which all replaced the dreaded ballet lessons. Was there no end to it? Only a few did I really enjoy the others I tried to use the same tactics of wetting my pants, but as I got older it didn’t work. The other kids would pick at me, today it would be labeled bullying but back then kids could get away with all manner of cruelty. I don’t think there is anything worse for a child to go through than being bullied by their peers. I was already shy and the bullying only intensified the inhibitions. Then to make it worse when I was sent home Mom would beat me with Dad’s belt, leaving angry welts on my arms and legs. I’m not saying she was abusive, it was just the normal form of punishment in those days.

The extracurricular nightmares all came to a conclusion eventually except the guitar lessons. I chose guitar lessons myself. My first dream had always been to play the piano, but since my parents were poor and couldn’t afford a piano to practice on I settled for the guitar. It was 1968 and I had been a big Beatle fan throughout most of the 60’s, so I did love the guitar. My brother Logan had bought me a red electric guitar for Christmas the year before and I loved it. I would play for hours.

I was sitting in my bedroom looking at my walls and remembered how they used to look. When I was in my early teens my walls had been a pale shade of blue although if you hadn’t already known the underlying color you certainly wouldn’t have known it from looking around. Every space on my walls had been taken up with pictures of the Beatles, especially Paul McCartney. I used to sit on my bed listening to Beatle music coming from my record player which sat on top of my hope chest in front on my bed. I used to listen to the music and sing along. When a love song came on I would gaze dreamy eyed at my life-sized picture of Paul and pretend I was singing to him in person. Yes, I was a hopeless romantic.

There was a story behind that six foot picture of Paul McCartney that took up my entire door. Several years prior I had sent a pair of slippers to Paul for Christmas. It was in the beginning of their career and Paul was still living at home with his father and step-mother at 20 Forthlin Road in Liverpool, England. I received a letter back sometime later. The letter was written by Paul’s step-mother thanking me for the gift. There were Paul’s initials on the sides of the envelope, which I recognized as his true writing. I was very familiar with Paul’s writing. I was constantly reading fan magazines and had seen his signature many times. Paul’s step-mother had enclosed a post card sized autographed picture of all the Beatles. On the back Paul had wrote To Kelsey, with all my loving, Paul. About a week later I received a tube in the mail containing the six foot poster of Paul with initials on the outside once again. It was months later while I was singing a love song to Paul and gazing at his picture that I noticed writing along the edge of his guitar. Again he had written To Kelsey, with all my loving, Paul.

I remember when the Beatles came to New York and were going to be at Madison Square Gardens. I wanted to go so bad to see that concert. Mom was not hearing of it; the answer was a definitive no. There was no way she was going to let me catch a train to New York, even though many of my classmates were going. She did let me go to see Herman’s Hermits in Hartford. Well, she didn’t actually let me go to the concert; we all went to the concert as a family. It was still great though. We also went to see the Supremes and a play of Oliver in which John Astin took the part of Fagin. Since I was a big Charles Dickens reader, I loved that. John Astin was the actor who had played the role of Gomez in the Addams Family on television. He was good; however, I would have preferred to have seen the play of Oliver years back when Davy Jones had performed as the Artful Dodger.

My room was small. It was now painted a sky blue and I didn’t have all the pictures on it. I had a few pictures in frames on my dresser but my musical obsessions had changed. I was now a big Monkee fan, especially Davy Jones. I also liked Mason Williams who was really a very talented guitar player, although I preferred his comedy songs. One of my favorites was The Prince’s Panties. He was also one of the writers for the Smothers Brothers show. I still loved Paul McCartney, but The Beatles were not at their peak anymore and would eventually break up in a few years (although I wasn’t aware of that at the time), but I had advanced onto different musical icons. I listened to most of the musical bands from the 60’s and liked them all, especially the British ones. My favorites were Herman’s Hermits, Billy J Kramer, Peter and Gordon, Jerry and the Pacemakers, The Rolling Stones, and the Kinks. I loved music and could listen to it