Little Pink House_ A True Story of Defiance and Courage - Jeff Benedict [4]
Susette called the Realtor and got the price for the beach house: $170,000. If her husband would agree to sell the ranch, she figured, they could pay cash for the beach house and still have enough left over for a small retirement nest egg. She hoped a house with a private boat dock might be enough to finally persuade him. That evening, Susette approached her husband in the yard while he worked on a piece of farming equipment. She described the house.
“You wouldn’t have to work anymore,” she told him.
“I don’t want to leave,” Jorsz said, not bothering to make eye contact.
She could tell he had been drinking. “You know, you might like this place,” she added. “There’s a dock. We could get a boat.”
He ignored her.
“I’m going to ask you again for the last time,” she said in desperation.
“I’m not leaving Preston,” he said.
Susette took a step back. “Well, if you don’t want to go, I’m going anyway.”
He showed no expression. Neither did she.
She had been let down her entire life. It had begun with her father, William Stevens, who had walked out right after Susette’s birth on June 14, 1956. Stevens had left Susette with nothing, not even a last name. Destitute, Susette’s mother, Josephine Chasse, had waited tables at a diner to support her six children in Millinocket, Maine, a remote rural town over sixty miles north of Bangor, not far from the Canadian border.
While her mother worked, Susette and her siblings fended for themselves during the long, hard winters. Her older brothers often fed her water with chocolate flavoring for breakfast. She wore socks on her little hands for mittens. At age four, Susette learned to keep warm inside their frigid house by climbing under the kitchen sink to be near the hot-water pipe. She had few friends and very little to look forward to.
In need of more steady work, Susette’s mother moved to New London, Connecticut, before Susette’s tenth birthday. She enrolled Susette in a Catholic school. After getting pregnant at age sixteen, Susette married Michael Kelo. By the time Susette turned twenty-five, she and Kelo had five sons.
Two years later, she divorced Kelo but kept his name. When her ex-husband failed to pay child support, Susette and her sons ended up on welfare for a short time before she found employment as a shipyard electrician at Electric Boat, a division of General Dynamics that manufactures submarines. With her five boys, she moved into a small house next to a chicken farm in Preston.
That’s when she met thirty-two-year-old John Jorsz, who lived down the road, alone on his ranch. He had never married. At thirty-one, Susette had a body that defied the fact that she had delivered five children. Her fiery red hair ran all the way down to her waist. After a hurricane took down a tree in her yard, she asked Jorsz to cut it up, which he gladly did. Then when her boys’ dog died, Jorsz helped them bury it. He even made a grave marker—a wooden cross bearing the dog’s name.
In 1988, Susette married Jorsz and moved into the ranch house, along with her sons. Although the marriage never sizzled, it suited their needs. Jorsz provided a roof and three square meals a day, and he cared for the boys as if they were his own. Susette brought livestock to the farm and used her green thumb to dress the place up with gardens and crops.
Things worked for eight years. But when Susette hit forty, she yearned for something more. Tired of the day-to-day grind of maintaining the ranch and a marriage headed nowhere, she wanted to pursue something for herself. Childhood poverty had cheated her out of an education. Early pregnancy and a determination to be a good mother