The smell was the first thing to hit her.
Her first waking inhale was stenched with stale beer, cigarette smoke and an ungodly mixture of various male colognes, and much to her complete embarrassment, most of those scents were caking her naked flesh.
"Your Mother would say you're nothing more than a pathetic whore if she saw you like this," 55 year old Jean Shulman cringed to herself.
"Yeah Jean," she replied out loud into the early morning silence of her decimated motel room, "If you saw someone in the same shape as you are right now...You'd call them a whore too."
Opening her eyes was the next step.
Between the slithering weight of the sun beaming through the Eastern window and the thudding grind inside her own head, that task proved to be immense.
"OHHH...GGRR," Jean winced when the first images of the room began to filter between her barely parted eyelids. "If this is what the room looks like... I don't even want to think what I look like!"
The memory of what happened the night before slowly creeping back into Jean's mind, the 'morning after' ramifications were thankfully pushed aside for the moment by an even more pressing force, her straining bladder.
Lunging up from the bed to rush to the bathroom, Jean nearly tripped on the mammoth swirl of sheets and clothes tangled on the floor.
"Gotta go...gotta go...gotta go," she mumbled, reaching out to grab the frame of the bathroom's entrance before pulling her unsteady shell of a body through the doorway.
Looking as if she was walking on shattered glass as her feet shuffled across the bathroom's chilly linoleum, Jean openly wondered how her 55 year old body had held up under such extreme conditions, a mere eight hours earlier.
A cold wave jolted through Jean's spine when she sat down on the rim and realized one of her previous night's visitors hadn't put the seat back down. Raising up slightly to adjust her situation, once she was safely perched back on the commode, Jean allowed the vertigo sweeping through her system to settle as her bladder emptied.
Once she was able to raise her head and focus for several seconds on her surroundings, Jean caught a half darkened glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror.
"God...Damn...," the normally religious widow mouthed from her seat on the bowl. "It's even worse than I thought."
* * * * *
Three Weeks Earlier
Jean Shulman had always hated being the center of attention. A trait unusual for someone who had spent over three decades as a school teacher. In her private life however, Jean had been married for 21 years to a car salesman who often dominated a room and over the years, she had developed a comfort level blending into the background.
When her Husband Floyd had passed away eight years earlier, Jean found it very difficult coming out of those social shadows, and instead decided to funnel her energies into her church activities and career rather than seeking out another relationship.
Jean's natural humility and concern for others had served her quite well over the years. She had made very few enemies and had the utmost respect of her peers and most of the now thousands of students that had passed through her classroom since her first teaching assignment in 1973.
That innate humility was surely being put to the test however as Jean sat under the horrible yellowish and humming glow of her school's gymnasium lights, at the head of one of several tables covered with fancy red tableclothes, surrounded by an assembled crowd of friends, colleagues, students and wellwishers.
"I shouldn't be here...not at least for another 10 years," Jean bitterly groaned under her breath, despite the vibrant smile that remained on her face as she engaged everyone in the room.
"Rubber chicken and a gold watch...that's what 31 years of service gets you," Jean's inner vitriol continued to fester as acquaintance after acquaintance came up to thank her and wish her well in retirement.
"Shame no one from the city school board could make it," Jean laughed to herself, replaying in her head the stress of the past year and why the higher ups on the Charleston school board had decided, because of the city's educational budget crunch, that she was more valuable to them taking early retirement than paying her the salary she had earned over the years.
Sensing the writing was on the wall, Jean begrudgingly accepted their offer.
Between her pension, savings and stocks, Jean knew that money wasn't the issue, she could live out the remainder of her life in relative financial comfort. The problem was she had always been a teacher. When she was married, her career was the only thing that gave her an identity separate from her Husband and her children. And after his death, with the kids all married and moved on with their lives, teaching was the one constant that gave Jean a daily purpose. All she really had left to measure her value anymore was watching those 150 or so students every year matriculate through her classroom and out into society.
And Jean had seen much of Charleston's social landscape pass through her classroom over those three decades. Several city councilmen, doctors, lawyers, policemen, shop owners, even 11 teachers at her present school had at one time been a student of hers. In fact, it was the first time one of her former students became one of her co-workers that Jean realized she was 'getting old'.
Despite her financial freedom and all the free time not having a roll to call every morning would create to do some of the things she'd always wanted to try, taking away that routine in her life was going to create a massive and uncertain void for Jean.
* * * * *
Financial comfort and free time, two of the Devil's best friends.
When her Husband had been alive, Jean's home life was taken up with her household chores, tending to the kids and after all that was done, grading her homework and making lesson plans for the next day. She really didn't have time for much else.
