Work

In the fall of 1992 I moved with my husband and our two-year-old daughter from Memphis, Tennessee, to a small cabin in the far north of Wisconsin. Our marriage was failing, my husband didn’t like working, and I had recently had an affair.

I applied for waitressing jobs in a nearby town, hoping to work at a restaurant on the lake near our home, but they had no positions available until the tourists returned in summer. The owner said he had another business, though: a strip club called Weasels. He needed a waitress there. I had a family to support. I was also in my mid-twenties and secretly found the idea exciting.

Correspondence

Thank you for the beautiful piece by operating-room nurse Kathleen Cooper-Loher, who describes working to save a teenage boy who’d been shot in a hunting accident [Readers Write on “Work,” August 2020].

My daughter Elizabeth died in a car crash twenty-four years ago, just a few weeks shy of entering the University of Chicago on a full academic scholarship. She was eighteen years old, a talented dramatic actress, a nationally ranked speech and debate competitor, and a two-time state mock-trial champion. I had fantasized that she might become the first female chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

It is not often that I feel Elizabeth’s loss as deeply as I did last night while reading to my sweetheart, who had requested I read from The Sun. I cried myself to sleep, wishing she could have been saved like the boy who was in the hunting accident.

I am grateful to The Sun for consistently printing authentic, human stories like the one that touched me so powerfully last night.

Billy Brown Albuquerque, New Mexico

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August 2020