Laughing Not to Cry

DOROTHY BRAINERD RUTHERFORD, 53 and childless, claws her way out of the hole her husband put her in when he disappears with their life savings. She thinks the bad times are behind her until her mother dies and leaves her cantankerous, trouble-making, senile father in her care. She is now the bewildered parent of her father who looks younger and steps livelier than she, and the bad times have just begun. Dorothy teaches high school English in Riverview, Conn., a small town north of Hartford. The year is 2000. She lives in a ten-room house that’s falling apart. Her family’s twenty-acre flower farm has gone to seed, and their flower shop is in ruins. Her teacher’s salary barely covers household expenses and now she has to pay a live-in caregiver to stay with her father while she works. Dorothy wasn’t always broke. Her grandparents left her a prosperous flower farm and money in the bank. She made it easy for her husband, HARRY RUTHERFORD, to steal her inheritance by making him joint tenant on everything she owned. Because she preferred teaching to running a flower business she turned it over to him when her grandparents died. Within a year he looted the business, emptied their joint accounts and vanished—and he did it all legally. Dorothy’s husband ruined her life and now her father is doing it too. Age and senility haven’t slowed COL. ARTHUR BRAINERD, USA Retired, war hero, hell-raiser and womanizer. His wife kept a lid on him but with her gone his hell-raising ways surface. Life would be easier if Dorothy put him in the Veteran’s Home but she resists. Selling her house and farm would solve her problems but living anywhere else is out of the question. Her roots run deep her. Roots and father are all Dorothy has left. The Colonel’s war with their octogenarian neighbor, EARL VINING, whom he cuckolded years back, sparks the plot. Every chance he gets the Colonel runs away to Earl’s place seeking his old paramour, Earl’s second wife, who is long gone. He opens old wounds Earl wants avenged. He bullies his nephew, OLIVER VINING, Superintendent of the Riverview School District, to pressure Dorothy into putting her father away. No matter how unreasonable his uncle’s demands, Oliver obeys. He is sole heir to Earl’s thirty-acre farm, a former dairy worth millions to developers. Yielding to Oliver’s pressure, Dorothy takes the Colonel to the Veterans’ Home to live but when she sees how depressing it is she takes him home. The experience bolsters her resolve to keep him home and gives her spunk she never knew she had. The Vining’s are furious. The Colonel’s flights escalate, driving Dorothy and his caregivers nuts. One after another they quit without notice, forcing Dorothy to stay home with him and to miss school while she seeks a replacement. Her absences pile up. Oliver foments trouble for her and for sympathetic colleagues who cover for her when she’s late or absent. To placate his uncle Oliver schemes to push her out of her job and off her land. Earl Vining discovers Dorothy’s husband Harry still owns half her property, and Oliver Vining dips into school funds to pay a private detective to find him and convince him to return. Faced with loss of job and livelihood, Dorothy sets out to revive her family’s moribund flower business, enlisting the help of her godson, Nick, whom she helped raise. Against all odds the business succeeds. It becomes a metaphor for her life—thriving while she grew up, going to seed when her husband took it over, and prospering again as she builds a new life caring for her father. As the business takes off, Oliver’s plot to find Harry bears fruit. He returns and demands his half share of Dorothy’s house and farm, but this time he confronts a woman to be reckoned with who beats him at his own game and turns the tables on the Vinings too.