Bette Cox                                             Fiction, Nonfiction, and Inspirational Writing

Bette Cox, 2009

Bette Cox

Elizabeth G. "Bette" Cox grew up in Florence, in the heart of South Carolina's Pee Dee region. She attended the University of South Carolina at Florence, now Francis Marion University, and in 2006 received a Certificate as Oral Historian from UCLA-Davis. This site is dedicated to her first love, writing.

Contents

The Simsville Inheritance

Avery Alderson has inherited an entire town from her Aunt Myrtle. What on earth will she do with it? Here's the next chapter.

Chapter 28 - Call the Boss, or
Not Call the Boss

A nagging thought kept running around in the back of my mind. Whatever is going on in Simsville is getting bigger and bigger. Too big. Maybe it was time to call my office.

Sure, I was on a leave of absence. Sure, they didn't expect to hear from me for another week or so. But a little unofficial help would be welcome, and I had no doubt it would be offered if I explained my situation to my boss. I could do a lot with the resources I had at my disposal but to do more would require my supervisor's authorization. Matt Ryan's authorization.

Did I want to explain the situation to Matt? That was my number one question. I'd worked very hard to arrive at my position, one of responsibility and respect, one where I knew what I was doing and others came to me for help. Not one where I went to someone else for help. It was sort of a running joke between Matt and me. He was Mr. Macho, I was Miss Know-it-all. He and I liked each other and our roles were complementary as a rule, not competitive.

The problem was, we were looked at differently by the higher ups. In spite of the fact that I had solved some difficult problems and saved our agency a lot of embarrassment as well as money, Matt got the credit for it. He didn't strive for the credit, he tried to make sure I was recognized for my efforts, but that didn't matter in Richmond. His immediate superior didn't believe any woman was truly capable of excellent work. It tended to create an air of tension between Matt and me.

Which got worse after our social lives began to coincide. First we discovered a mutual interest in jazz. Then a mutual interest in old classic movies. After running into each other several times at concerts and theaters, we began to schedule our free time to "coincidentally" coincide. We'd never had a date you could exactly call a date, right out. That was sort of frowned on around the office. Still, with coffee and burgers after a movie, wine and cheese at a concert or a long walk to wind down after a long day, things were progressing. Not fast, just comfortably. Any tension on the job could be dealt with after work in a sensible conversation, ending with laughter and a good night kiss. I wanted to keep it that way.

So, call the boss, or not call the boss?

Continued...

Bette's Blogs

Family Memories

Glimpses of life growing up in northeastern South Carolina in the 1940's, 50's and 60's, give or take a decade or two. Here's a sample:

Why I Love Murder Mysteries

(Part Two of a story on Mimi, my Ordinary Grandmother.) The summers I spent with my Irish grandmother Mimi and grandfather Da weren’t all ordinary work in the house, yard, garden or farm. I did my share of exploring and excavating the sand hill dirt for arrowheads. I found a few, too. My brother Bud, young uncle Mike and I climbed our share of chinaberry trees, stringing tobacco twine and tin cans for walkie-talkies. Police detectives! Soldiers! Spies! We quarreled over who’d be the good guys since no-one wanted to be the enemy – they always lost.

I felt my share of itchy sawdust inside my jeans from zooming down the sawdust piles on makeshift sleds of pine bark. I received my fair share of maypop hand grenade blasts, coating the outside of my jeans with more sawdust. Red bugs loved sawdust as much as I did, I discovered. Kerosene in the bathwater! Mimi scrubbed our jeans with lye soap, muttering under her breath words not understandable to young ears, probably not repeatable either.

But some days it rained and some days it was just too hot to play outside. One such afternoon I was helping Mimi with butterbean shelling when the mailman's car pulled up to the edge of the yard. Mimi set down her pan, shook out her apron, and walked out to the mailbox. She pulled out catalogs addressed to Occupant or to grandpa, sorted through duns and circulars, and that's when our day became a bit more fun. Her True Crime magazine and Reader's Digest had arrived.

Mimi and Da got the Florence newspaper delivered bright and early every morning. In the mail, Da got his farm-to-market bulletins and Popular Mechanics and Farmer's Almanac. In a pinch these would do for light reading, if you were bored enough. But Mimi subscribed to True Crime and Reader's Digest, McCall Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, Woman's Day, and Red Book!

Back inside the house, we took a break. Mimi leaned back in her armchair with her feet propped up, I sprawled on the sofa by the window and she handed me the Reader's Digest. She kept the True Crime.

Mimi loved murder mysteries. She enjoyed short stories and hard news. Biographical articles. Recipes. Gardening, repairing, sewing, buying and selling, but she loved adventure stories and murder mysteries. And I learned to read and enjoy them too, right along with the short stories, hard news, even the Farmers Almanac and Popular Mechanics.

On days when I had no playmates for company, I created my own. I meandered along ditch banks from one end of the tobacco fields to the other, ignoring blackberry brambles and sandspurs as I plotted mysteries of my own. I foiled many dastardly deeds as I went, demolishing dirt clods and bad guys. In my stories I always won the heart of the brave detective and became the toast of the town, or something equally wonderful.

Continued...

To contact Bette Cox:

1231-1 Via Ponticello
Florence, SC 29501
(843) 665-7620
E-mail bettecox@bellsouth.net

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