The Town Gossip

 

Rose Belford knew everything that went on in town.  She spent her days on the telephone asking questions about who did what, when, where and why.  Everyone knew her as the village gossip.

 

Yet who was Rose and why did she have such a need to know everyone else's affairs?

 

 

Well poor Rose had been brought up in a very poor family. At fifteen she went to work as a dishwasher for a run down restaurant in a small town no one had ever heard about in the life she now lived. One night when she was seventeen, she  stole  a few dresses, shoes and some makeup belonging to the owner's daughter and headed for the city. She had saved up fifty dollars and had planned to change her life.

 

When she stepped off the bus in the big city, she was dressed in her old work clothes. She quickly found a new job as a dishwasher and went to work again. This time though, she had a plan. She was going to find a rich man to marry and she would live in a big fancy house.

 

One night she overheard some people talking at one of the tables about a party for the mayor's son. He was getting home from college and would be opening a law practice of his own.  She was at that party and she made herself very available to the young lawyer. In no time she found herself pregnant and getting married. With a few well placed lies, she was able to convince everyone that she had lost both of her parents when their boot manufacturing business burned to the ground.  Without anything left in her life she had found her way to the city to start over again. She spent her free hours at the library educating herself on how  to be a refined lady with manners.

 

After having two children, she told her husband that she no longer loved him but that she expected to be able to keep the house, children and her lifestyle. He  was happy to move out  for he had realised that he made a terrible mistake getting her pregnant. They shared custody of the children.

 

Rose Belford was free to live her life through the juicy details of others. With a telephone and her outgoing nature, she became a social butterfly and was invited to all the best parties in  the city. People invited her  because they feared what she would say about them if she didn't.  Rose lived until the age of eighty-seven and  had managed to talk about everyone else's shortcomings but her own. Gossips are like that!