AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter 2
In Monroe, Georgia, Melanie Meyer rushed through the front door and into her small, drab kitchen, clutching to her chest a package of takeaway baked potatoes and lamb. Her eight-year-old son, Rhys, followed close behind, with his backpack strapped to his back and his arms loaded with books.
She glanced at the kitchen clock: she was late. She’d had to work a second shift at the diner, which was fine, because the extra money it brought in was always welcome, but it had meant that she would be cutting things close picking Rhys up from Scouts. Tonight was worse, because there’d been a loud argument between the diner’s owner, Louis, and a drunken customer, and after all the ruckus was over and she was finally able to jump into her wheezing rattletrap of a car and speed over to Scouting headquarters, Rhys had been waiting alone for fifteen minutes.
Melanie didn’t like that. Just because she’d made it all the way across the country to get away from Wilder didn’t mean he was incapable of finding them. During all the years she spent with him, her ex-husband had managed to worm his way into her psyche so deeply that even with thousands of miles between them, she was still always looking over her shoulder.
Rhys put his stuff down and took the package of food from her arms. “It’s fine, Mom,” he said with a calm maturity beyond his years. “You go ahead. I can get dinner on my own.”
She looked over at her son, small for his age, with hair that was a few shades lighter brown than her own, eyes like her mother’s, dark honey to Melanie’s chocolate brown. He had a narrow, pointed face and an earnest expression that radiated sensitivity and an uncommon level of emotional intelligence. All qualities that his father, her ex-husband, Wilder, resented.
“You’re raising that kid to be a pussy,” he used to whine at her, whenever he looked over at Rhys, who wanted to be a botanist when he grew up, carefully pasting newfound dried leaves and flowers into his scrapbook. “Picking flowers and shit like a little girl! Gimme some time with him and I’ll turn him into a man!”
She’d wanted to say that Wilder never spent time with him anyway, he was too busy running his small casino back in Nevada where they’d lived. But as time went on, she realized that his not spending too much time with Rhys was more a blessing than a curse, because when Wilder was around, Rhys was a nervous wreck, frantically trying to live up to his father’s expectations by catching baseballs and putting grubs on fishing hooks, knowing that if he messed up, he’d get a tongue-lashing.
Instead of allowing him to grab his own dinner, which the sweet child was perfectly capable of, she shook her head. “No, hon. I got this.”
She reached up into the cupboard and took down two plates, two sets of silverware, and two glasses and set about serving dinner. It was still warm in its Styrofoam containers. Back at Louis’s Diner, staff were allowed to take home any leftover food at half price, which was a great deal, especially since Melanie was always so tired at the end of her shift that the idea of even facing the stove at home made her groan. She piled generous amounts onto her son’s plate: despite the fact that he barely weighed 75 pounds, he could put away food like a champ.
Then, only mildly embarrassed because Rhys was standing at her elbow watching—absorbing his mother’s neurotic behavior, she knew—she took down her trusty kitchen scale and began to weigh her dinner.
Roast rib of lamb, four ounces.She pulled out her phone and tapped it into her calorie counter, which she used so often that the icon was at the top of her opening screen, right next to Phone and Contacts. Calories: 386. Okay.
Baked potato, medium. Calories: 160 without butter. Unbuttered potatoes sucked, but she’d been so tired this afternoon that she’d given in to the temptation to have a large Coke, and that was 275 calories easy, so tonight, butter was out of the question.
Salad: eat freely as long as there is no dressing.
Melanie felt Rhys’s eyes on hers as she popped both plates into the microwave.
“You sure you don’t want a little more?” he said softly. “There’s another whole potato left.”
“You might want another snack later,” she told him, but they both knew that wasn’t the reason. According to her app, another potato would put her into the red zone for the day and nullify her decision to restrict breakfast this morning to a single banana.
Unconsciously, her hand went to her midsection, feeling the roll of fat there that she habitually disguised under loose-fitting t-shirts and mom jeans. Mom jeans! She was only 29 but dressed like she was 15 years older. She sighed.
If ever she had the admittedly slim chance of accidentally releasing a genie from a bottle, she’d need only one wish: to rid herself of the 30 stubborn extra pounds that had hounded her, running off whenever she worked hard at a new diet but then returning with a few more friends, ever since she was 15. That was all she wanted, more than vast wealth or superpowers or even world peace.
A discernible waistline.
Unbidden, Wilder’s voice rang in her head, just as it always did whenever she thought about her weight, or obsessed over every morsel she put into her mouth. “Look at yourself. I mean, just look at you! You really expect me to want to make love to you, looking like that? Don’t you realize that you’re the one who forces me to find other women? Jeez! If I could see your goddamn rib cage, at the very least, maybe I’d be able to get it up for you!”
She cringed and looked away, praying that Rhys couldn’t read her mind.
Maybe he could, and maybe he couldn’t, because he quietly placed their dinners on trays and took his to the small, cramped living room. She sat next to him as he clicked on the TV, knowing exactly what she wanted to see. Rhys understood how she felt about Queenie Abara, how her favorite talk show host’s unending enthusiasm and cheer was sometimes the only light in her exhausting and cheerless days.
She’d missed most of the show, but the snippet that she did catch immediately ensnared her attention. Angelica de la Rosa was talking. Something about Missed Opportunities. Something about the south of France. “… Maybe life just did you one too many bad turns,” she was saying. Then she pointed to a web address scrolling below her, urging viewers to try their luck and apply.
“We can do this together!” Queenie agreed.
Missed opportunities? Second chances? That sounded too good to be true. She glanced at the stack of books on interior design and decorating languishing in the boxes she still hadn’t unpacked, even though they’d fled Nevada eight months ago. After the divorce came through, while they lived just thirty minutes away from her marital home, Wilder hadn’t given up on pestering them, especially targeting Rhys. He’d turned up early one Saturday morning with his gun rack securely strapped to the back of his truck, demanding that Rhys come outside and spend the day hunting. Make a man out of him.
Rhys, the kind of boy who would spend hours figuring out how to tape up a butterfly’s broken wing, had returned from his first and only hunting trip ash white, sobbing and shaking. Melanie declined Wilder’s proffered sack of dead rabbits, none of which Rhys had shot. The boy had had nightmares about that encounter for weeks afterwards. And Melanie’s subsequent refusal to allow him to go hunting again had been met with outrage and threats of legal intervention.
In retaliation, Wilder began hanging out outside of Rhys’s school, nabbing him even before Melanie could make it into the parking lot, and whisking him off to the casino where he would force the boy to watch the pole dancers gyrate. “Just to make sure you don’t turn out… you know,” Wilder would sneer. “Especially since the only example of womanhood you’ve got in your life looks like that Pillsbury Doughboy with boobs.”
The torment had been so great that they had fled as far as they could get—legally, since Melanie had full custody. And even though Wilder’s bouts of interest in fatherhood were infrequent and unpredictable, he had been so outraged that something belonging to him had been taken away that he’d followed them twice. This had been their third move to a new city this year.
So Melanie sat back on the ratty little couch and chewed slowly, because the human brain fooled itself into thinking it was fuller that way, and looked on longingly as Queenie talked. Chances at a new life… in the South of France, no less.
