You'll Never Get Rich

Ambrosia Beasley was a modest woman and very mouse-like in both her look and manner. No one had called her Ambrosia since her grandmother died 17 years ago. They called her Rose. But when Titanic was released, and subsequently unavoidable, unfairly, or otherwise, she received a merciless fusillade of ridicule for not allowing Jack a share of the door. 

Or else they called her Be or Bee, quite unclear spoken as it was, and that evoked such Shakespearean quotes as "To be or not to be," and endless drivel about honey, honey pots, busy as a bee, flowers, the birds and the bees, on and on. This sort of annoyance came mostly from boys or men, who are often indistinguishable and which Ambrosia mistook for spiteful razzing when, in actuality, it was inept flirting because she was stunning in such a simple and unique way that she evoked such bungling. Males are but a collection of nerves. Their very existence and sexual pleasure is the result of nerves and nerve responses. Of blood flow to nerve ends, a series of impulses, and one-way streets of convoluted neurology chasing mechanical rabbits of orgasm like greyhound dogs. 

But she never understood, and humbly she did not see the beauty in herself, which was most evident to everyone else in the universe. She looked strikingly similar to Audrey Hepburn, and on the occasion when someone made the fair comparison, she blushed and emphatically denied any resemblance as though it were a trial, and she alone handled her botched defense. Whereas most women see a beauty they don't possess, or that which they have only in filtered pictures, Ambrosia didn't consider her outward beauty at all. 

But at 37, nature taking its obvious course, she was on the cusp of becoming a spinster. And her company of cats, which didn't help the matter, each named after an old Hollywood movie star that struck her as something they probably were never, were an ever-expanding troop that further put her in peril of becoming that which she never wished to be, but that she made no concerted effort to delay, much less to thwart. And so, she was drifting fast towards a permanent state of celibacy in a house that was like an abstentious monastery. Perhaps, her home wished for the laughter of children or for the joy of a puppy. For the comfort of family over the holidays and friends who came to call, but that it hadn’t known for a generation. It managed itself in an ascetic existence as its abstemious owner, who rarely regarded herself in a mirror, and who was, by default, nearly classifiable as an asexual nymph. 

Errol, Clark, James, Burt, Bogie. Not one femme fatale among them. All comfortable in their feline masculinity for not one among them sprayed the sofa or the ottoman. Simply they played a dramaturgical role in Ambrosia's life, each with the sincerest belief in their gentle feline head that they could win the Academy Award and that Grauman's Chinese Theatre was the litterbox by the back door in which they ceaselessly cast prints of their paws for posterity, and waltzed around as though they were always in the limelight of a red carpet. 

Rose worked at Perfect Weddings, which was formerly called Always a Bridesmaid until that name became an obvious impediment to business and so the much simpler, Perfect Weddings, was adopted in an epiphany of sorts by Lena, the crafty silver-maned owner. Rose was Lena's perfect employee and had worked for her for 21 years since she was 16 and in high school. She never asked for a pay raise and graciously took them as it came. She rarely took a day off. She never left to go to college. She didn't seem to aspire to be anything more because she was content as she was. Willed her grandmother's house, that aforementioned nunnery dedicated to but one nun, which she kept preserved as though it was 1957, with a picket fence and carefully cultivated flowerbeds.

“You'll never get rich,” her mother told her. She cross-stitched that portentous warning and framed it as a housewarming gift to herself when she inherited that “drafty-old house,” as her mother put it. It had always been absurd to her that anyone would be obsessed by getting rich, as though that was the great human aspiration. She was willed the house by her grandmother because her grandmother knew she was the only relative who wouldn’t sell it. Her grandfather built it and there was a wealth of memories within, ghosts who mingled leisurely in those drafts.

Lena was a chain-smoking 75-year-old South Carolinian debutante. She vowed one day to will the business to Rose for much the same reason Rose's grandmother willed the house to her. Because Rose would never sell it. Besides that, Rose knew the ins-and-outs better than herself and so she was the perfect legatee. If ever some ill-fate regrettably fell upon Lena, Rose would in fact inherit the business. But Lena was such that she seemed impervious to death. Hell, itself, would have to come to earth to claim her, not simply invite her as it does so frequently with third-party couriers such as cancer, diseases of the various organs, and other undescribed tragedies and illnesses. It probably would have to personally stop in at Perfect Weddings, as well, because she worked abysmally long hours, granted many of those hours involve watching Golden Girls marathons and chain-smoking Pall Mall cigarettes in the office with the nicotine-tarred walls. 

Love was as foreign to Ambrosia Beasley as death was to Lena Calhoun, when for both, each should have been relevant considerations, by beauty and demeanor, and age and habits, twice respectively. And in that commonality, their bond was struck. It was as though love was as afraid of Rose as death was afraid of Lena. For some reason – terrified. And both passed upon them like they were champions of duck-duck-goose, impervious to ever being the goose. 

Rose was the best seamstress in town, though modesty would preclude her from ever thinking such. But it was a simple fact that if objectively and omnipotently considered, could not be denied. She was not a wonderful salesperson in the least. But she was what she was and so few people are what they are. So few people in this life are as genuine as she. Patient as she. Rose watched the news on a Saturday night. Languidly knitting sweaters for her cats or doing another cross-stitch which she would frame and hang on her walls or give as a gift that was somehow relative to the receiver's lifestyle. On the news, NASA was warning everyone of an asteroid the size of Texas that was hurling through space on a collision course with Earth just as her fingers began to numb. She turned it off as not to disturb her cats for she treated them as though they understood everything and were affected by traumatic third-party events. Tomorrow she would do a new cross-stitch with a Texas-size asteroid. It would say: Bad News Travels Fast. She would find a place on her wall to hang it. 

Meanwhile, Maxwell Sealover was across town watching the news intently. He was Rose's age, unbeknownst to either of them. They grew up in the same town and went to the same high school. But never did they share a class, and their schedules were as though they were drawn up to keep them apart. Precisely when she was there, he was here; and when she was here, he was there. Their lockers were 16 letters apart and after graduation Maxwell joined the army and when he came home, he took an insurance job in the big city, got married, and had two kids. But he and his wife divorced, and he auditioned for and became a successful alcoholic after she moved to Colorado with the kids, finally admitting her secret love affair with an proctologist who discovered her precancerous polyp, and who got his own practice in Colorado Springs. Who loved Maxwell's children like his own. Who loved Maxwell's wife like his own. Who did this thing with his finger that no one needs to know. In an effort to save his marriage, Maxwell went to treatment. But when he came home, there was a different family living in his upscale suburban home on East Poplar Avenue, who drew the curtains and called the police when he looked in from the sidewalk. 

He lost his job and had to move back to the little city where he shared a sterile "luxury apartment" with his brother who traveled more than he was home. But time was fast running out and no future could he see in his glass ball. His was more like a black bowling ball. His brother had a way of depressing him, and their mother who came in once in a while like a dramatic antagonistic foil in a bad TV sitcom, made matters worse by insisting he ask his wife for forgiveness and to try to get her back, despite her affair with the proctologist. Despite moving away with him. And his brother would take the opposing opinion and the two would argue and Maxwell would want to drink. But he couldn't drink, he knew, or else he would have to start back over with the treatment program which would mean nine more months away, if even he had insurance at that point to pay for it. And nine months away would mean he would not see his kids in at least that time, and there was no worse thought than that. 

Maxwell wished for that asteroid to hit Earth and snuff all life out in the ensuing conflagration. To end it all mercifully. But only if such devastation was instantaneous and no one was left to struggle on some post-apocalyptic world. But then he thought of his beautiful kids, his two little girls, and all the kids in the world, and such rabid opining suddenly ceased. 

He struggled to find work, but then got a part-time job at a hardware store. The owner hired him because he liked his personality, he said. And so it was. This is how he spent his brand-new life. Selling people screws, nails, and appliances, and trying them to help them find what they needed to repair their house in some way or another. And occasionally, he cut a length of rope for someone's treehouse rope ladder or tire swing and some happy cherry-cheeked child reminded him of his daughters. And all he could think of, all the while, was how his wife once told him that he needed to go see Dr. Kim Sun, the proctologist. And how she raved like no one should rave about a proctologist. He should go because perhaps he too had a precancerous polyp. But all he could think about was how his wife never in her whole life wanted to do anal, and how she is now with a guy that does it for a living. The irony was too much. 

He wanted to drink, but drinking was his enemy. It is who he blamed for his wife's betrayal. For losing his kids. For losing his job. It was old Jack Daniels' and Augustus Busch's fault. They conspired against him and millions and millions of others. Selling a product at the expense of people's health and decency. Costing them their livelihoods and families. They were responsible for nearly every black-eyed wife in the world. Nearly every car wreck and bad liver. He finally got what those teetotalers we're crying about. Those prohibitionists. Those mother's against drunk driving, that collective fraternity of angry women who paid their dues to the club with the blood of a child because some asshole got drunk and got behind the wheel like Mad Max. He was mad, too. Mad as hell at himself. He was so mad that he ended up going to the bar and getting drunk to deal with his anger, and all those people in the grainy photos of a make-believe history book were washed away with the repeal of his personal prohibition. It was 1933 in his liver all over again. 

He was, himself, a happy drunk. Happy until it was over and then the old familiar guilt and hangover ruined his previous night's gains. And depressed in the ensuing erosion, and in a ball of himself like an armadillo along a Texas highway, he laid on the couch and watched meaningless football games and advertisements for beer and liquor. For trucks. For jewelry. For insurance. For prescription drugs. For colon cleanse. For arthritis medication and bedsheets. For shoes made somewhere in China. Absurd assholes in phony utopian alt-realities, softcore porn, non-factual social justice commentary to impress upon the gullible consumer that we care. We care a lot. A careful representation of every demographic. Smartly crafted to manipulate the eye and the brain, its employer. Laying there, near comatose. Like the shell of cicada on a walnut tree. Near death. Barely blinking. 

So he drank again to alleviate that burden. And again to alleviate the next until it became a game of habitual dominoes, and once more, an addiction. And it soon became obvious to him that the only escape was death. And if nature wouldn't act naturally, despite his sincerest wishes for it to do so, prayers for a personal goofball-sized asteroid to hit him in the head at a million miles an hour, then he knew he must hasten death upon himself. And again he thought of that length of rope. 

You'll never get rich, he lamented. Wasn't that always the goal and the underlying theme of life as we were taught it? To get rich and to nestle into suburbia? Have 2.5 kids and a half-million dollar mortgage you pay off in 15 years, rather than 30. That's making it. To have more than you need and maybe to be charitable, but only in proportion to your excess so that the greed hides somewhere in a house too large, or a car too new, and $200 shoes made by a kid in a sweatshop you don't think about. Eating steaks whose lives and slaughter you don't think about. Voting for the candidate that best perpetuates this American life every four years. Whoever the media endorses for you. That shared goal of everyone alike, by legitimate means or otherwise. Whatever it takes. It is beat into us from birth in music and TV commercials. In holiday movies. Consume, consume, consume and give gifts of your consumption because no one wants love for Christmas. They want a diamond. An SUV. A Sealy Posturepedic. He had been guilty like anyone else. But Maxwell would resign without a penny in his pocket. What he had saved, a few thousand dollars in the bank, he gave to a children's cancer charity who sent him a t-shirt as a thank you. He gave away everything he owned. You'll never get rich, a commercial told him. He then threw the TV into the apartment dumpster, not wishing to impart its poison on another. 

Hanging seemed like a gentleman's way of doing it. Shooting oneself would leave such a mess for someone to clean. An intolerable lack of consideration. Pills were too unreliable. Perhaps there is an efficiency handbook on the subject, somewhere, he considered. Of all the ways to do yourself in and be clean and considerate about it. He recalled reading somewhere that Sylvia Plath put her head in an oven. But that was a long time ago, and assuredly the manufacturers have implemented some safety feature to prevent such a dreadful thing from occuring. No one wants their product associated with the torso of a housewife jutting lifelessly from it. Her head like a Thanksgiving turkey. So at the end of his shift on a Thursday, he cut himself an adequate length of rope and took it home with him. To his brother's apartment where there were no trees, no rafters, nothing from which to hang. 

But there was a park nearby with hundreds of trees, one of which would be unwittingly complicit in his death. Grown all its life to hang a man it never knew. An arm of which would hold his weight and not relent despite his flailing and inevitable protestation near the end when his body learned what his brain was up to. But as he tied the noose, as described in the online instruction, he realized that he had no suit for a proper burial because he had donated his entire wardrobe to the Salvation Army. Not a single suit hung in his closet, just empty hangers. He did not want his mom or brother to have the burden of buying him a suit simply to bury him. His kids were a thousand miles away. He lost his home and his job. And he couldn't stop drinking. Maybe the tree would understand and wouldn't mind so much that he was to become its dead fruit. It would adopt him, in some way. Maybe his body wouldn't flail at all and voluntarily give up his ghost. 

Because there are no stores called Perfect Endings, or Perfect Funerals, Maxwell Sealover went to Perfect Weddings, which was just across the street from the hardware where he worked, to buy his burial suit. Twice he nearly stopped because, honestly, what did it really matter? But then thinking that his mom would surely buy a suit and ask the funeral director for it back after the funeral so to take it back to Macy's or wherever she got it because it made no sense to bury someone in a suit you could return for good money, he went in and the bell chimed and Lena snuffed out her cigarette in the office and peaked her gray puffy head out of the door to see him standing there. Expecting no more customers, Rose had just clocked out and left for the day. Fate had conspired once more, once last, against them, it seemed. 

"May I help you, son?" Lena rasped. 

"I need a suit. A, um, a cheap suit."

"Groom? Best man?"

Maxwell looked around at the dozens of headless mannequins, each wearing a wedding dress or suit as though they were all at a fantastic wedding party and some psychopath came along and beheaded every one of them. And even though they were headless and mindless, they were carrying on with it, getting married to satisfy that itch to marry and couple, thus to conform to societal and/or religious convention. He didn't answer her question, but asked one of his own which always made Lena's tangerine skin crawl. 

"Do you have a clearance rack?" 

Lena reflexively scowled and pointed her pruned finger to a back wall where there was a rack of clothes, mostly outdated and oddly-sized suits. Maxwell nodded and Lena disappeared back into the office, dismissing him as a simple browser. It was too late on a Thursday and she was too old for that shit, she said to herself as she lit another cigarette. She sat back down in the office and watched The Golden Girls and occasionally glanced up at the security camera of Maxwell intrepidly perusing the bargain rack. If he selected something and made his way to the register, she would handle it and then close up shop immediately after. Her eyes said shoo everytime they looked at him as though he were a mouse in the cupboard. 

But much to her dismay, the bell on the door rang again and someone else came in. To her relief, however, it was Rose, who sighed that she forgot her purse which was hanging in the office. In 6,000 shifts across 20 years, she had never once forgotten her purse. Lena asked her if she didn't mind staying until the customer left and Rose, never one to say no, agreed with a meek smile and whimper and went to ask the man if he needed help. And just as she saw him, and he saw her, and she was about to ask if he needed assistance, the asteroid hit and there was nothing more. 

So easily it could have been, but it wasn't that way at all. It was the very moment that the asteroid passed and people at NASA and those with all the right credentials breathed a collective sigh of nerd relief, that Ambrosia Beasley first said hello to Maxwell Sealover and everything in the world convalesced. Every wound healed; every thing broke was fixed; and what was lost was suddenly found. But still they carried on as though they didn't know. As though they were unaware that such kismet existed in this life and had, at last, brought them together.  

"And for what occasion is the suit, if I may?" Rose inquired politely. She looked at him very differently than she looked at anyone before. She might have looked at him the way she looked at her cats. Or a completed cross-stitch. But there was more. "Is this for your wedding?"

"No," he chuckled. 

"Is marriage a laughable prospect to you, sir?" she jested. 

"In my condition, yes. Yes, it is." 

"Best man? Groomsman?" 

"Neither those." 

"Well, understanding the occasion would certainly help me suit you best, if my opinion matters." She was remarkably bold for her normal self. And she stood there, all the while, as though she were intent on making a sale, something she was never any good at. But in that way, she was agreeable and the shop earned a pleasant reputation for a lack of pushy salespeople like Buddy's Carpet next door or the oil change place that always up-sold "better quality" oil.

"Your opinion certainly does. I have a condition. A, well, it's a terminal condition, I'm afraid. And so I am selecting a suit for my burial." 

Though the Texas asteroid missed Earth only minutes ago, another equally devastating asteroid had struck the very heart and soul of Ambrosia Beasley at that moment. That which had come so suddenly was all for not, and she didn't know how to respond. Her mind was a burning hayfield. She had never, at least, knowingly, sold anyone a burial suit before. 

"Please, um, I'm sorry if I made this awkward," he apologized seeing her unease. "I, uh, just need a good suit. Nothing outrageous, of course. Maybe something that was returned or, you know, rented. I don't know if you're like that O.P. Gallo place and have rentals for sale."

"No. We don't do rentals. But sure, I can find you something, that would be, well, I mean that would look nice, on you. I can, alter anything here, for you..." she offered uneasily.

"I don't have much money. So alterations will not be in the budget. I think it will have to come from the bargain rack."

"Oh. Um..." Rose bit her lip and Lena shut the office door and walked out into the shop, smelling of money, cigarettes, Diet Coke and rum. She told Rose it was time to close, but Rose assured her she would close up after helping the customer. It was no problem at all, she said. Lena looked Maxwell over and smiled in instant approval. He was an attractive and harmless-looking man. There was no wickedness in his eyes, which she felt sure she could always see in anyone with evil intentions. So she left and the two were alone.

"My name is Maxwell. Max Sealover."

"Ambrosia Beasley." They shook and electric impulses flowed between them in the palms of their hands. 

"Ambrosia," Maxwell smiled. "It's a beautiful name. I've not known anyone by such."

"Nor have I," she returned. "But they call me Rose, usually."

"I like that as well. But not as well. Ambrosia. That means, um, immortality, I think. Not mortal, rather. Immortality is food for the gods."

"Or a dessert food of the south for southerners," she smiled at him. "You know your mythology, sir." 

"And you know your southern desserts. My wife used to say that I am a man full of useless knowledge," he replied. "I think I'd do pretty good on Jeopardy." 

"Your wife? You're married then?" She feigned impartial interest with a smile. 

"Yes, but she left. Months ago. To Colorado or somewhere with her proctologist."

"I'm sorry."

"No. Don't be. It's only what she took that hurts. Those who leave us never belonged with us to begin with, you know. So why should we be upset when they choose to go?" 

Rose agreed, but didn't inquire as to what she took. She assumed it was a child, or children. 

"How about this one?" Maxwell raised up a red suit that looked like something a kid would wear to a prom. "It's $35. That's what I happen to have. I think it'll do."

"No. I don't like it," Rose disagreed emphatically. "Red isn't a good color for the occasion. It's bad luck."

Maxwell chuckled. "I don't think I need to be concerned with luck, Rose." 

"Please. Let me," she insisted. She floated around the store for a moment and selected a handsome charcoal gray suit which was $400, according to the price tag. She choose a thick black tie. "I can tailor this slim fit suit to your size. The pants and shirt as well. I'll just need to take some measurements." 

"Rose, I don't have that kind of money..."

"You needn't. It was supposed to be on clearance. I forgot to mark it down."

"For what price?"

"35 dollars. By coincidence."

Maxwell laughed outright. "You're a terrible liar, Ambrosia Beasley." 

"Nonsense," she grinned. "It's the least we can do. That I can do." 

"The least we can do," he repeated rubbing his head. "It's a kind and good deed. So few good deeds anymore. So few." He took a deep breath. "I agree, so long as it doesn't come out of your pocket." 

She smiled and nodded her head as though to agree. Another lie. Perhaps it was because he was dying that she was so open with him. So at ease. In his company, without any trepidation, she found peace and a sort of solace she had never known in another person, not even in her father. In a cat or two, yes, perhaps. But in a person, no. There wasn't any expectation and certainly no consideration of a future that was not to be. This was it, likely, she knew. This was the one time she would see him and he would see her and then he would be gone. 

As he excused himself to the fitting room to try on the suit, she daydreamed of whether she would go to his funeral, or if this encounter would obligate her to go to the showing, at least. She had a sad an abysmal feeling that his funeral would be sparsely populated, so much so the people who work at the funeral home would be inclined to attend as she heard they sometimes do for someone without many, or any, loved ones. Or maybe she could send flowers in lieu of herself. Make a donation to whatever charitable cause that vowed to fight his cause of death. But such impersonality would never do, she decided. She would go. So she would have to read the obituaries. Maxwell Sealover. She wondered how he spelled his last name. 

He emerged from the fitting room with a perfect and gracious smile that immediately enriched her. Something of a young Lazarus coming out of the tomb, a Sunday school picture she remembered as a child. How can someone dying be so pleasant, she considered. We are all dying anyway, she heard a voice in the hollow of her ear whisper. The tick of the clock is the steady beat of death's drum. It's unrelenting and reliable countdown such as that of a time-bomb that can never be defused, and whose flashpoint shall never be known or realized precisely because of the conflagration of the affect. Some of us are snuffed like candlewicks and even when the candle is burned to the nub, the exact time when the wax overcomes the wick and all light goes dark cannot be discerned. We all hope simply to go out in the night with a dream, rather than consciously to yield to death in some sad and desperate manner, our life repossessed in some humiliating manner. The futile strife of us fugitives of death, only to succumb to the strident scream of the dogs of that hellish pursuer who hath finally caught up to us. Least, such is the way it seems to the worrywart. To the faithless souls who don't think of death as some passage to someplace better. 

"I don't think I need to alter it all!" she marveled. "It's a perfect fit." 

She regretted being so hasty, as an alteration or two would have prolonged the moment and she felt, wholeheartedly, that the moment deserved prolonging. But he smiled at her and returned to the fitting room to take it off and change back into his ripped jeans and pediatric cancer research t-shirt. When he came back out, Rose was there, smiling as though she never satisfied the emotion. And Maxwell was comforted by her smile, assuaged by the twinkle in her eyes and the warmth of her spirit that was evident in every parcel of her being. He hadn't known much tenderness and decency in his life, and far less charity. Everyone he ever knew, personal or otherwise, seemed as though they were in some sort of perpetual arbitration against him. To cheapen him. To get him at a bargain or not at all. Even his most personal relationships seemed always based upon some bartering of goods and services and resulted, more often than not, in a court of redress with complaints for damages. But she was absolutely selfless, and he could tell, standing there in front of her with the suit in hand, that she was without motive and full of a purity of love that he had only known to exist in dogs and children. 

"I cannot pay you back," he said a bit morosely, knowing she would not simply write the suit off as he had made her agree. 

"But you have. In full. I can speak frankly. I guess, situation as it is, I must. I see something in you, Maxwell, that I've not seen in anyone. A million customers must have come here in twenty years and I've not had a similar experience. You've reminded me, that I have something perhaps I never considered I have. Or perhaps that I thought I lost, or was simply born without. So thank you. Rather than you owing me, I owe you. A debt I am afraid that I cannot adequately pay without the time to pay it."

Maxwell took his last fifty dollars from his wallet and put it on the counter. A gruff Ulysses S. Grant looked upward at Rose like a disapproving father. He wouldn't need it anyway. Not where he was going. 

"I had fifty, to spend" he coyly admitted. "But hoping to spend only thirty five. The last fifteen I would have wasted on a cheap bottle of liquor that I don't need. Not anymore."

Rose took the money and put it in the register which rang its predictable song. And the inevitable goodbye was short but sweet. Everything meaningful she meant to say went by the wayside, washed out in a deluge of sudden apprehension of the finality of the goodbye itself. Famous last words, a simple an unmemorable take care and have a good evening, returned by an equally disappointing and impersonal farewell that certainly didn't reflect that which was felt and that which had been exchanged. 

The bell chimed when he left around 8:17 p.m. and Rose lethargically walked around to shut off the lights as she had done a million times before, but never so sullenly. Both were thinking of the other, Rose perhaps more emphatically because her mind was not usurped by an antagonistic emotional tyrant and afflicted such the way his was by his alcoholism. Yet, she coursed through him, and in that single dose of her it was as though he were healed. And as he looked back through the window to see the lights go out, one after another, he knew that if he left he would come back tomorrow and she would be here. But he didn't wait. And so that bell eagerly clanged again which revived her, just as she was walking towards the door to lock it. 

It was about a year later that some comet or other passed, which they watched from the roof of their house as the cats and his two girls who became her two girls, as well, watched them from the upstairs window. He wore that charcoal gray suit and black tie when they were married. Tying the tie before the ceremony pleasingly reminded him of the noose that he never did. Of a tree that was not complicit, nor that bore him as its dead fruit. Her latest cross-stitch hung appropriately on the hallway wall: You'll never get rich (because you already are). 

And she kissed him on the roof and they climbed back into the window to be with their cats and girls, the wealthiest two people who've ever lived. For it is true, in the words of another cross-stitch which ought to hang in a bank somewhere if honesty was ever their business rather than greed: Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

It wouldn't have mattered to Rose if he had been dying when they met. She would have loved him anyway. In however many days fate afforded them to love, they would have made the most of them. But when she learned that he wasn't dying of some incurable sickness, shortly after they met, but rather of a brokenheart, she rested her head upon his chest like a child listening for the sea in a seashell and then, at last, gave him a share of the door where he has been since, the two of them one inseparable and wealthy soul.