Make an 30 minutes audio version of the below story in 65 ye...

Prompt

Make an 30 minutes audio version of the below story in 65 years old woman voice: If you've never mixed ketchup with hot water to make "tomato soup," then you've never been broke the way I was broke one freezing week in February 1989. I had fourteen packets. Count them. Fourteen. Two from the McDonald's my kids had begged for on Saturday because another mother at the church had taken pity on us. Four from a Burger King where a stranger in the line behind us had paid for our kids' meals and then slipped a few extra packets into my hand like she knew. The rest I'd been fishing out of my purse for weeks, anywhere they showed up—gas stations, diners where I cleaned tables and a kind waitress would pass me a handful on my way out. I boiled water in the pot my mother had given me when I got married. I stirred in the ketchup. Fourteen little red glops dissolving into pink water. I added a little salt, a little pepper, and I called it tomato bisque because I had waitressed at a diner called The Bluebird for two years when I was twenty-three, and I remembered the menu used to say "hearty tomato bisque." Bisque sounded like food. Bisque sounded like something I could set in front of my children without weeping. I made three bowls. I put oyster crackers on top because I had one sleeve left at the bottom of a box from Christmas. I sliced a single hard-boiled egg thin and laid three slices in each bowl like a garnish, because we had two eggs left and I wanted them to last. Then I called my kids to dinner. Tommy was twelve and the man of the house now, though neither of us had admitted it out loud. Lilly was nine and already learning to be quiet about what we didn't have. Ruthie was five and still asked for things out loud, which broke my heart every single time because I had to learn to say no in a voice that didn't sound like no. They came in. They sat down. They looked at their bowls. Lilly was the one who asked first. "Mom, what is it?" "Tomato bisque," I said. "And don't tell me there isn't enough. There is. Eat up." Tommy didn't ask. Tommy looked at his bowl for a long moment, then picked up his spoon. He took one bite. He looked at me across the table. His eyes, brown like his daddy's, went glassy for just a second. Then he ate every drop. That was the night I made a promise to myself. Not a promise to God—I had spent all my prayers. Not a promise to my dead husband Frank, who I still talk to in my head every night before I fall asleep. A promise to those three small people sitting at my table, slurping soup I had lied to them about. I promised myself: this is the lowest it will ever be. Whatever I have to do, it will not get lower than this. I didn't know if it was true. I didn't know how I was going to keep it. But I knew if I didn't promise, I was going to lie down on that kitchen floor and not get up. Let me tell you how I got to fourteen ketchup packets in the first place. My name is Margaret. Everyone calls me Maggie now, except my granddaughter, who calls me Nana Ketchup because she's six and I told her that soup story once when she was sick and needed cheering up. My husband Frank Delaney dropped dead on a Wednesday in July 1988. He was thirty-five years old. He was a mechanic at the Ford plant on the east side. He had a bad heart he didn't know about and a habit of skipping doctor visits because he said he felt fine and we couldn't afford the co-pay. I was at home folding towels when the phone rang. There is a sound a telephone makes when it is about to change your life. I have learned to listen for it ever since. A long, low trill, and the air in the room gets colder, just for a second. I picked up. A man's voice I didn't know. He said he was from the plant. He said Frank had collapsed. He said an ambulance was on the way. He asked me to come to the hospital. I asked him if Frank was dead. There was a pause that lasted so long I started to count my own heartbeats. Then he said, "Ma'am, I'm so sorry. He was gone before we could get him in the ambulance." I hung up the phone. I walked into the kitchen. I sat down on the linoleum and I folded a towel. I had been folding towels when he called, and my hands didn't know how to do anything else. When Frank and I got married in 1974, we were both twenty-one. We had nothing. He had a '67 Camaro with a busted transmission. I had a yellow suitcase my mother had packed for me because she didn't think the marriage would last. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment above a bakery, and the first morning we woke up married, the smell of bread came up through the floorboards and I told Frank I thought God was on our side. Frank laughed. He was a man who laughed easily, with his whole body. He worked hard. He came home smelling like gasoline. He paid every bill on time. He told our kids every night that he loved them, and he did it in the same tone of voice every time so they'd know it was true. When Frank died, we had $217 in savings. We didn't have life insurance. He had asked about it once, years ago, and the agent had wanted a physical, and Frank had put it off because he said his heart was strong as an ox. Which it wasn't, apparently. There is no softer way to say this: I had three children and no way to feed them. The first person I called after my mother-in-law was Frank's older brother, Paul. Paul was the practical one. Paul came over that night with a bottle of whiskey and a notebook, and he sat at my kitchen table and told me everything Frank had and everything Frank didn't have. Frank didn't have a will. Frank didn't have a paid-up policy. The only thing Frank had was his last paycheck, which the plant would mail in about three weeks, and a small pension from the union that wouldn't kick in for two more years because Frank wasn't sixty-five. Paul said, "Maggie, I'm so sorry. I wish it was different." I said, "Paul, what do I do?" He said, "I don't know. I really don't know." That was the honestest answer anyone gave me for a long time. I started applying for jobs the next week. I had no work history. I had been a stay-at-home mom since Tommy was born. I could type forty-six words a minute, but I'd learned on an electric typewriter and that wasn't the right kind. I had a high school diploma and a nursing aide certificate I had picked up in '83 from a six-week program at the community college, before Ruthie was born. I put in applications at the grocery store, the laundromat, the gas station. The grocery store called me back for an interview and then didn't call back again. The laundromat didn't even return my call. The gas station manager said I could come in and he'd "see what I could do," and then he looked at my application and saw my address and said, "Oh, you're over on Bell Street? I don't think we're going to be a fit. We need someone with their own transportation." I didn't have a car. We'd had one Chevy, and I'd had to sell it three weeks after Frank died to make rent. I went to the welfare office on a Tuesday. I waited four hours in a brown plastic chair. The waiting room smelled like smoke and Lysol and someone else's baby. There was a television bolted to the ceiling playing a soap opera I couldn't hear. When I finally got to the front of the line, a woman named Mrs. Patterson sat behind a window like a bank teller. She had on a brown cardigan and reading glasses that hung from a chain around her neck. She never once looked up at my face during the entire interview. She looked at my paperwork. "How old are the children?" "Twelve, nine, and five." "Father deceased?" "Yes." "Date of death?" "July 14th of this year." "Was there any life insurance on the father?" "No, ma'am." She made a small note. I watched her pen move across the paper and I thought, she has heard this story a thousand times and she doesn't have time for me, and that is fair, but I am going to die if she doesn't help me. "Mrs. Delaney, I'm going to need to verify a few things. We'll need to send someone out to the home. We'll need to verify any support from family members." "I don't have any support from family members," I said. "My mother passed when I was nineteen. My father is in a home. Frank's parents are in Ohio. We don't have anyone here." "Then we'll process your application and get back to you. It will take approximately four to six weeks." Four to six weeks. I had three kids at home who were going to need to eat in four to six weeks. "Mrs. Patterson, we don't have four to six weeks." She looked up at me then. The first time. She didn't have anything mean in her face. She had the face of a woman who had heard ten thousand variations of the same sentence I had just said, and who knew that the system she worked for moved at the pace it moved at, and that she was not allowed to make exceptions. "Mrs. Delaney," she said. "I am so sorry. We will process it as quickly as we can." She gave me a one-time emergency voucher for $78 in food stamps. I walked out of that building with my handbag pressed against my stomach because I felt like I was going to throw up. I bought two gallons of milk, a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread, a pound of bologna, a bag of rice, and four cans of Campbell's soup, the kind with the pull tab. Tommy came home from school that day and asked me what we were having for dinner and I said "a feast" and I meant it, because we were going to eat three nights that week, and that had not been guaranteed. Let me tell you about my son Tommy. I have three children, and I love them with the kind of love that doesn't have words, but Tommy is the one I have to talk about, because he is the reason I'm alive today. Tommy was twelve years old when Frank died. Tommy had been a good, quiet kid—bookish, careful, a little on the small side. He liked to draw airplanes. He liked to read. After Frank died, Tommy stopped drawing airplanes. Tommy got a paper route. The man who ran the route was named Hank. Hank was maybe sixty. He had a gray mustache and a bad hip and he drove a brown Buick that sounded like a lawnmower. He had been delivering papers on Bell Street for thirty years. I didn't know Hank was doing this until Tommy came home one Saturday in September with eighty-one dollars in a plastic bag and said, "Mom, Mr. Hank wants to know if you want me to keep doing the route." I said, "Tommy Delaney, you are twelve years old. You are not getting a paper route." Tommy said, "Mom, I already have a paper route." He delivered the Birmingham News every morning, six days a week. He was up at five. He had a bicycle. He had a canvas bag. Tommy earned eighty-one dollars a month. He gave every dollar to me. I tried not to take it. I failed. That winter, Tommy started mowing lawns on Saturdays. He had a push mower that Frank and I had bought at a yard sale for fifteen dollars the year before. He mowed three yards on our block and one yard on the next street over, for old Mrs. Keener, who paid him extra because she liked the way he edged. Tommy saved half of what he made mowing and gave me the other half. I cried in the bathroom at least twice a week that winter. I cried quietly because I didn't want him to hear. I cried because my twelve-year-old son was feeding his mother and I had nothing to give him back. One night in February, after the bisque night, Tommy came into my bedroom. I was lying in the dark. I think he thought I was asleep. He put something on the nightstand. I waited until he went back to his room. Then I turned on the lamp. There were two twenty-dollar bills and one five-dollar bill and four ones on my nightstand. It was all of his mowing money for the month. I lay there with that money in my hand and I understood for the first time how my mother had felt when she was alone with me at twenty-three and my father had been gone nine years and she didn't know how she was going to do it. I understood because I was her now. I was the mother in the kitchen who was going to lie down on the floor if she didn't make a promise. I made the promise again. This is the lowest. It cannot get lower. Within a week, I had broken the promise. It got lower. The eviction notice came on a Wednesday in early March. The manager of our apartment complex—a man named Mr. Kroll, who had lived across the hall from us for four years and never once asked us in for coffee—slid the notice under our door in a yellow envelope. I owed 462.Ihad 462.Ihad87. I had about ten days. I called Frank's brother Paul. I called my aunt in Birmingham. I called the church. The church gave me $200 from a "benevolence fund" and the pastor's wife, a kind, soft-spoken woman named Ruth, told me to come back if I needed more. Ruth also told me about a woman in her Bible study group named Darlene, who ran a "women's empowerment business" that was "really taking off" and "could use someone with a heart like mine." I called Darlene. Darlene had a voice like honey poured over glass. She talked fast. She talked about being your own boss. She talked about the women on her team driving BMWs. She talked about how she was going to change her family's legacy in three years and she had only been in the business fourteen months. She asked me to come to a meeting at the Holiday Inn. I went. The meeting was held in a banquet room with cheap carpet and a coffee urn that I could smell had been burning for hours. There were maybe thirty women sitting in rows of folding chairs. Darlene was at the front in a red blazer. Darlene's presentation was ninety minutes long. It was about a skin-care line that had been featured in a magazine I had never heard of. It was about the freedom of being your own boss. It was about a $499 starter kit that I could "easily recoup in my first two weeks." It was also, I would find out later, about getting me to bring in two more women, who would bring in two more women, who would bring in two more women. I gave Darlene 50thatnight.Ididn′thave 50thatnight.Ididn ′ thave50. I had gotten it by returning two cases of pop bottles I had been collecting in a bag behind the grocery store, redeemable for five cents each. The bottles had taken me three weeks to gather, one at a time, on the walk home from my cleaning jobs. Darlene told me she was going to call me the next week to walk me through the rest of the process. She never called. About a week later, I heard from my aunt that Darlene's "team" had collapsed. Three of the women on her team had lost their houses. Darlene had moved to Atlanta. I had learned my first lesson about money from the worst school. I had lost $50 I could not afford. I had almost dragged two of my friends into the same trap. I had learned that anyone who tells you that you can get rich in two weeks is lying. But I had learned something else, too. Darlene had talked about money for ninety minutes. She had used words I had never heard: residual income, leverage, passive income, asset, liability. I didn't know what any of them meant. But they were in the air like a vocabulary I could learn.