The Georgia Watkins Memorial Medical Arts Building was in the final months of completion when the Nelsons arrived in the town that would be their new home. Connected to Pioneer Memorial Hospital, the Watkins Building was a simple building with a low-slung roof, utilitarian and undistinguished, save for its decorative use of the multi-toned stone mined at a ranch just south of Rocky Ford. A waiting room for the four main offices was shared. It was a good idea for such a small community. Rocky Ford, tiny and out in the middle of nowhere, had done itself proud. Few towns its size had their own hospital and even fewer had such accomplished doctors in private practice.
Over the years, several MDs, chiropractors, dentists and optometrists would run their practices out of the small building. None would leave a lasting mark of greater importance than Perry Nelson. All would remember him and what happened after a sexual cyclone named Sharon blew into town.
Chapter 2
IF ONLY SHE HAD NEVER MARRIED MIKE FULLER. IF only she had acted upon her own impulses. Sharon drummed her fingertips on the tabletop and remembered there had been an out one time. She had considered the alternative.
The crisply engraved invitations were in the mail and Sharon, then barely twenty, wanted to cancel the November 1963 wedding. She had made a mistake. She sat at the kitchen table with her parents, Morris and Josephine Douglas, in their Maryland home. Sharon pleaded with her folks to back her up, to help her this one last time.
But Morris and Josephine were stone-faced. Crimson came to the old man’s ears. Mrs. Douglas fidgeted with a handkerchief and daubed at the shiny surface of the table.
“I don’t want to marry him,” Sharon said softly. Tears pooled in her eyes.
Josephine shook her head and deferred to her husband.
“You’d be a damn fool to pass up this chance. He’s going to be a minister. He’s making something of himself.”
The volume of his voice increased. Sharon felt herself sinking in her chair, getting smaller and smaller. She was Alice falling into the rabbit hole. Going down. Way down.
Later, when retrospection was possible, albeit justifiably suspect, Sharon recalled her thoughts at the time.
“They were reinforcing this little girl in me that marry up, maybe if you marry somebody that’s all white and clean and happy, you’ll be okay. You won’t have to deal with some of the things from your childhood. You won’t have to deal with your feelings of I'm not good enough…”
Three days after John Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, Sharon donned a white wedding gown that looked like the yardage of lace used to make it had depleted the world’s supply. At twenty, she was a beautiful bride. Her hair was dark and thick, her eyebrows shaped to perfection. Dimples cut into her exquisite, milky skin. If there had been a prettier bride in 1963 or any year before it, none who was at the wedding could think of her.
While her parents looked on, Sharon stared into Mike Fuller’s eyes and in a soft voice holding traces of her father’s southern accent, promised she’d remain his forever, until death.
And the numbing years flew by. Mike’s career as a minister led them from Ohio town to Ohio town. Sharon batted her eyes for the old men in the Adventist governing body. It was all for Mike. Everyone thought she was so lucky to be married to a man with such a future.
Problem was they didn’t have to live with him. They didn’t have to walk in the rut he created.
It was 1968, and despite the terrible and bloody war in Southeast Asia, for many, America would never be more free in spirit than it was that hot, humid summer. It was inescapable and, in a way, inevitable. The grainy images on television and the ink-smudged front pages of newspapers begat a kind of social, a kind of gender consciousness that had been dormant for so very long. It was time for everyone to turn, turn, turn. And while Cleveland, Ohio, was by no means San Francisco, there was still the patchouli-scented promise that the world was changing, and women like Sharon Lynn Fuller were changing along with it. More freedom and more fun. More possibilities. The young wife listened to church-prohibited music on a transistor radio, she went to movies that were forbidden by the church… she took it all in. For the first time in her life, Sharon even drank and smoked. And she liked it. As wrong as it all was, Sharon Fuller liked it.
Five years into her marriage to up-and-coming minister Mike Fuller and still childless, Sharon had once and for all seen the future as her husband and parents had indelibly outlined it. There would be no love, no excitement, no fun. Only mind-numbing work and sex whenever he wanted would mark their time on this planet. Sometimes it would sneak into Sharon’s consciousness that only death would bring euphoria. Life had become a predictable bore completely centered around her husband’s responsibilities with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. When she married Mike, she had cemented her lifelong role. She was the dutiful minister’s wife, a frozen fixture with a rote smile in a second-row pew. She was to flawlessly type up newsletters, sermons, meeting minutes. She was to serve punch at church functions, help out with the youth camp, teach Bible lessons, lend an ear to the troubled, the confused and the bitter.