For Richer or for Elly

[dreadedcandiru2]

To conclude the look at the fantasy project's core cast, here's my take on the Elly of the late 2010s:

Name: Elly Patterson.

Age: 65

Birth Date: August 26

Likes: Reading, coffee breaks with friends, doing arts and crafts with her kids, gardening, good books, good movies, good live theatre, laughter, cooking, leisurely soaks in the bathtub (not necessarily in that order!)

Dislikes: Bathroom scales, never-ending laundry, unreliable people, litterers, fighting and all that's "unfair"

Hobbies: Sewing, writing, reading, jogging, gardening, and writing letters to friends and family..

Aspirations: Use the Bachelor of Arts degree she finally attained to take over Liz's business as tutor when she goes back to teaching full time. Patch things up with April. Try to avoid obsessive need to post uncomplimentary anonymous online comments about Michael's books and movies.

About Elly: Most of what we know about Elly was covered in the documentary comic strip "For Better Or For Worse"; when we left her several years ago, it looked as if she and John had a happy-ish ending. This happyish ending came to an end in 2010 when John had a fatal heart attack at the grand re-opening of the Lucky Clucker. Needless to say, Elly did not react well to the large hole blown out of her life. She spent months in a sort of state of disbelief until she had a knock down, drag out argument with April about how John must have wanted her to feel as if she couldn't function without him because that's what men do. The anger that generated seems to have regenerated Elly. She was going to show that kid who was some passive idiot jumping out of a limo yelling "I'M COMING, JOHN!!!", that's for damned sure. She finally got her BA, she took a more active role in the community and she even made a packet selling off those empty lots John made into a train layout. What she didn't manage to keep was the house she was living in at the time because her idiot son decided that she didn't need an expensive electrician to install a ceiling fan when a blundering numbskull like him could do it for free.

The resulting house fire left Elly without much in the way of physical baggage. What it did leave her is a realization that her endless angsting over what she did wrong to make Mike the way he was was foolish. It wasn't that she went from post-partum depression to menopause, it was that you can't fix stupid. She sure wasn't going to live in the home she'd raised him in because she wasn't some damned trophy. She moved in with Anthony and Liz because Liz needed a baby-sitter, Anthony needed a clue-by-four about how he was messing up his life taking his dad too seriously and Elly needed ready access to bus routes because her deductible is somewhere in the orbit of Neptune thanks to the fact that Mike also thought he was a mechanic. We find her spending her time working in the community, getting creeped out by how now that she's a granny, kids are cheerful worker bees, wishing she could take back the horrible things she said to April and waiting for the day that some guy sues Mike for plagiarism so she can ask him "Can you feel the schadenfreude?"

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Having John die of a fatal heart attack at what I can assume is a fried chicken restaurant warms the cockles of my black, black heart. That way we can dispense one of the characters that aren't needed, plus it erases any baggage that Lynn had about her ex-husband.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

What I did was taking Lynn's "John gets brained by a giant fiberglass cartoon rooster" concept and made his necessary exit less comically grotesque.

[howtheduck.livejournal.com]

It could always be that he faked his death and now works as a dentist in a nearby town living with a dental hygienist 18 years younger than he is, who works for him and who has teenagers.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

That could work as a plot arc. Every so often, they'd have to go to visit Jo Weeder and he'd talk about how Dr Yammerson looks like John.