My name is Charlotte (BWWM)

Chapter Twenty-Six

August 7, 1967
Charlotte sat up in her bed when James left. She noticed that the flowers that he had bought her were beautiful. She decided to put them in a vase. Charlotte got up and went to the hallway closet and started looking for a vase. She found a greenish looking one. It was a bit dusty, so she went to the kitchen sink to rinse it out. As she was washing the vase, she thought about the first time she had seen James. How eager she was to talk to him. She loved her husband, but sometimes she wondered why he could possibly love her. Charlotte knew that it was silly to wonder such things. She missed her husband but she wasn't sure if she wanted him to come home. While she was deep in thought, she started thinking about cleaning up the house for her mother. Charlotte tripped over a mahogany chair that was sticking out. The vase dropped out of her hands and it shattered.

Charlotte quickly walked around the mess and grabbed a broom and dustpan out of the kitchen closet.  She went back to the kitchen and started sweeping up the glass. Most of the bigger pieces of glass had been swept up when Charlotte tripped over part of the broom. As she fell, she put her hands out in front of her. Her hands and her knees ended up with glass shards in them. She managed to scoot on her bottom toward where the telephone was hanging on a hook. She was able to pull herself up and she dialed the first number that she thought of.  The phone rang for a few seconds and then a female voice answered the phone.

"Hello, this is James Williamson speaking. How may I help you?"  Charlotte couldn't believe that she had called him but she told him what happened. James chuckled a bit when she told him that she had tripped. After she told him about the glass, he was worried that she would fall again. He decided that he was going to tell his boss that he needed to leave for the day. He was surprised when his boss agreed with him. James drove for about fifteen minutes away from downtown Lexington and towards his in-laws' house off of Russell Cave Road.

When he got to the house, he banged on the front door. It took Charlotte several minutes to get to the front door. While James was waiting, he went and sat in one of the chestnut rocking chairs that were on the porch. Charlotte opened the door, and she let James in. James looked at his wife's hands and knees. He asked Charlotte where her mother kept the medical supplies. James went and got the first aid kit from the bathroom. He also got some tweezers, so he could remove the glass from her hands and knees. The first thing he did was have Charlotte sit in the kitchen, in a chair facing him. He cleaned the tweezers with rubbing alcohol and started to remove the glass. Charlotte didn't flinch much until James started removing the glass from her knees. "I am sorry, if this hurts, I am almost done." Once James finished removing the glass, he cleaned the hands and knees with hydrogen peroxide and he bandaged them up. James asked his wife why she wasn't at college or work. Charlotte told him that she had withdrawn from college and she hadn't been able to go back to work. Charlotte told him that she had been diagnosed with depression,  but there wasn't much that the doctors, could about it. James listened to his wife and when she was done talking, he said " I am sorry that you have had to deal with this on your own. I want you to come back home with me. I miss you so much." Charlotte missed being home with James, but she didn't know how she would be able to function by herself. She knew that she wouldn't be able to talk to many people about she was going through since it was normal to deal with these type of things on your own.  Charlotte decided that she was going back home with her husband, but she waited until her parents and Francine got home.  She told them that she had decided that it was time to go home.  She hugged her parents, and Francine before she left to go home.