Mary’s jealousy made it extremely difficult to ask her opinion about buying a gift for his mother. One Christmas, he had hit upon the plan of purchasing the same gift for the both of them. His brilliant idea hadn’t worked out. Both of them were disappointed to discover he had bought the same thing for the two of them. Both of them had been so unhappy that they had made his life miserable for months with their constant kvetching about his Christmas gift. After that fiasco, he had been careful to buy vastly different gifts for the two women in his life.
Thomas marveled as he looked at the two women he loved. If the differences in their ages hadn’t been so striking, they could have been twin sisters. Even their hair color and jaw lines were the same. Seeing the two of them together gave Thomas an eerie feeling that he was looking at his mother at two stages of her life; one was the mother he knew as a child and the other was the graying woman of his maturity. The physical resemblance between the two women was remarkable.