ACT ONE ━━ CHAPTER ONE The Lord's Always Listening
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TO BE QUITE CLEAR—Bernadette Berkeley absolutely loathed Coal Creek, West Virginia. The small town was run-down, dirty, and she could've sworn to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that it got uglier as the weeks went on.
Moving there was not her decision, but instead her husband's since "her" aggressive spending habits broke the bank. Thus they needed to downsize from their large, inherited plantation home to the modest, one-story rancher that was smaller than the horse stables on Desmond's parents' property.
Betty wanted to just ask for another loan from her parents-in-law (more so mooch off them) but for once in their lives, the elderly Berkeley couple finally grew backbones and denied their son's (daughter-in-law's) request. Make no mistake, they loved their boy, but he and his wife had so many unpaid loans to a variety of people that they were actually doing the two middle-aged folks a favor.
So, they moved to nowheresville and had to, for once in their lives, figure out how to deal with their dwindling financials. Originally, Betty had thought her husband was overreacting and having some sort of mid-life crisis in uprooting their family to some odd town that was an hour away from the nearest shopping mall, but since she didn't even step foot near their bills, she had no clue how bad it had actually gotten.
So now Desmond had to work on paving roads early in the mornings before going to his nine-to-five office job afterwards, and Betty was now stuck with—
(She couldn't say it. It made her nauseous)
—cleaning houses and doing others' laundry for a quick buck or two, although she was very particular about which families she'd be working—doing favors for. Only those so far down the totem pole that they were beneath it were eligible for Betty Berkeley's services, only so that they wouldn't run their mouths to the more socially-acceptable families in town and, if she was ever caught, could cover herself by saying she was "helping out the less fortunate."
In order to aid in keeping her secret, Betty woke up before the roosters crowed to visit her neighbors' homes while her husband went to work with the road crew. She liked to minimize the amount of time staying in her clients' houses, so if she was just doing their laundry, she'd take it and wash it within the comfort—if she could even call it that—of her own home.
That's what she was often doing while her daughter, Adaline, got ready for school in her room, now having to make new outfit combinations with the smaller rotation of clothes she had to choose from. After she finally settled on an acceptable outfit for her mother's standards, she opened the ceramic jewelry box on her vanity, only to see that not only was a large amount of her jewelry gone, but so was the necklace she had worn religiously every day since her grandfather gifted it to her for her eighth birthday.
