Total pages in book: 53
Estimated words: 49888 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 249(@200wpm)___ 200(@250wpm)___ 166(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49888 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 249(@200wpm)___ 200(@250wpm)___ 166(@300wpm)
“You could have just listened a bit harder,” Trigger continues with his eyes down. “Why else would he go to Florida for just a couple days?”
“I didn’t know that either,” Pete grumbles. “I assumed… well, I don’t know what I assumed.”
“Maybe you should have asked him,” Trigger observes. “Communication is important.”
Pete clenches his jaw. Trigger is careful to keep his eyes down, but I almost think he is enjoying this. He definitely had the upper hand. Who knew he was so observant?
When we get to my apartment, the guys are all serious again. Trigger gets out first, peering through the windows to see if Roger is home, I guess. It doesn’t even bother me. I am starting to expect that they will always go ahead and make sure everything is okay, not just for them but now for me. They seem to take the responsibility of looking out for me quite seriously.
As we parade into my old apartment, I try to hold back the wave of emotions that I know is coming. I have only lived here in this place for three years. It’s not like it is my childhood home or anything. But it is the first place I ever lived in on my own, the first place where I decorated for myself and only had myself to please.
I picked out the flowered material for the curtains. I found the sofa in a thrift store, and grabbed the pillows from a Memorial Day sale at a department store. Coffee tables came from a garage sale down the street. The kitchen table was actually put out in somebody’s garbage one day. Since I haven’t been here in a couple of days the bowl of flowers on the dining room table is all wilted and sad now.
I painted that wall. I even sewed the curtains. I did all this, and now it’s just… over.
I feel strong hands circling my shoulders. Pete embraces me from behind, resting his chin on top of my head and hugging my shoulders. I take a moment to lean back against him and sort of steal his strength. He will hold me up. I know it.
“Do you mind if we start with the big stuff?” he asks gently, though I know that he is asking me so much more than that.
“Yeah, I trust your judgment,” I answer quietly.
He kisses the top of my head and releases me, then points Stephan toward the bedroom. I hear them in there, moving the dresser away from the wall, and I hear the bed legs scraping along the floor.
I don’t know where to start. I don’t feel ready to start, at all. I would rather take a nap or something. All of a sudden I feel very tired. Maybe I should go for a walk. Maybe if I walk around the block a couple of times, the situation will have changed dramatically. Roger may come to his senses. I may win the lottery. A lot of things could happen in the next, oh, couple of hours or so.
The task seems enormous. I know nobody likes it, but moving is pretty much my least favorite activity ever. When I was a kid, we moved every couple of years. Everything we owned would be put in boxes, labeled, and tucked into a self-service truck that we drove to the next place. Sometimes we even just borrowed a truck when we couldn’t afford to rent one. Sometimes we reused the boxes that we had used for the last move since we hadn’t even gotten around to throwing them out before we had to leave again.
My mom raised me on her own. I remember my dad being around until I was about six or seven years old. Then they got a divorce, and I never saw him again.
My mom wouldn’t talk about my dad. It wasn’t that I was expressly forbidden to ask about him, but if I ever brought him up, her face would go tight and stony. She would answer my questions with single words—yes or no. Yes, he had been real and I had not imagined him. No, he was not coming back.
It is hard to raise a kid on your own. I know that. My mother always had at least two jobs, usually both part-time. Sometimes both jobs were waitressing jobs. Sometimes she would get temporary work in a factory or something, and hope to get hired on permanently. She always said that union jobs were the best jobs. They would have benefits, and they were pretty stable. You could work a union job for twenty or thirty years, and then retire. But they were difficult to get, and somehow never worked out.
That is why we ended up moving around so much. Mom would get excited about a new factory that was opening up somewhere, somewhere she would be able to get the kind of job where we could have a little house, with a little yard, and maybe a dog or something. Eventually she expected to save up enough money to have a little shop of her own. Someplace where she was the boss, where she could sell things that she picked out herself. Nothing dirty or grubby. Nothing that involved food service. A fine, clean job that enabled us to have a nice, simple life.