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Chapter 1
Mama had died three months ago, and that is how I know Wesley Parker hasn’t broken my heart. The pain that shoots through my heart at his cliché-riddled rejection of me is barely an echo of the deep ache Mama’s absence has carved in my soul. His rejection is a bullet whistling through the wound left by a cannonball, hardly noticeable.
I stare silently out the windshield of his truck at where his headlights light up my childhood home as I wait for him to finish his speech. He had obviously practiced it and it would be rude to interrupt and tell him that his breakup talk was less imaginative than the soap operas Mama had watched every Sunday morning. I can’t give him the tears he so obviously is expecting, but I can keep my mouth shut and not tell him I am closer to laughing than I am crying.
“We can still be friends.” A sad smile is carefully painted on his face, as if he expects that offer to be the one ray of sunshine in my current pitiful existence. Does this boy even know me?
“I don’t really see any point to that.” I turn towards him, giving him my best ‘bless your heart’ smile. Wesley recoils with shock, maybe at the brashness of my words or maybe at the fact that I had the audacity to ruin his perfectly scripted breakup with genuine feelings.
“Hannah, you can’t mean that. We’ve been dating since our junior year of high school. We know each other, that doesn’t go away.” he explains slowly, as if he thinks I have lost my mind and maybe I have. He makes a logical argument. We have been dating for almost three years now. It is normal that he should expect that I would be devastated, but I’m not. Sure, I’m hurt, but I’m not prideless enough to accept his pity friendship. Mama raised me to have more self-respect for myself than that.
“True, we do know each other, but I also know Frankie Black, the cashier at the gas station, and we are not friends. He didn’t even cheat on me, and we are not friends. Quite frankly Wesley, knowing you isn’t a good enough reason to be friends with you.” speak as slowly as he did, letting the condescension drip from my tongue.
His expression hardens as the reality of my words sink in and I smile in self-satisfaction. He should have expected me to give him hell when he came to break up with me. I have never played his games. That he even thought I would be was proof of what a wreck I’d been since Mama died.
“Okay then. I guess I will see you around.” He glares out the windshield, his jaw tense. He turns his truck back on with a jerk of his hand and I take that as my cue to leave. I shove the passenger door open and swing out. Wesley still won’t look at me.
“Yeah Wesley, I’ll see you around.” I respond sarcastically as I slam the door shut behind me. I walk back towards my house without looking back. Wesley Parker is just another part of my past now.
I climb up the porch steps and open the front door to find my dad on the couch watching an old western. He smiles at me and pauses the television. I give him my best attempt at a smile in return and attempt to walk past him even though I know he wants to talk to me. I don’t want to rehash the Wesley situation. I had managed not to cry so far not because I didn’t care, but because I wouldn’t process it. I was numb.
“What did Wes want to talk to you about, sweetheart?” he asks, stopping me from sneaking away down the hallway. I sigh and walk back to the living room. I flop down on the couch next to my dad and brace myself for his reaction. I so don’t want to talk about my feelings with my dad. We don’t do that. Ever.
“He broke up with me.” I state, as emotionless as I had been with Wesley.
“Oh sweetheart, I’m sorry. I know that must be hard, considering the last few months.” Dad pats my knee awkwardly, and I know he doesn’t want to have this conversation as much as I don’t. This was something Mama would have helped me through. She would have told me to hang tight and grabbed ice cream from the freezer. She would have made me write down everything I had loved about Wesley and burn it. She would have made fun of his pathetic attempt at a mustache. She would have reminded me of all the cute boys waiting to fix up my heart back at school. She would have made me feel happy to be dumped. Instead, I just feel empty.
“It’s okay, Dad. I’ll get over it.” I grasp the remote from him and unpause his movie, effectively ending the conversation and Dad immediately relaxes, glad to be done with that conversation. I sit with him on the couch watching cowboys shoot at each other for about fifteen minutes before I sneak away to my room.
Once behind my closed bedroom door, I let myself feel. Tears trickle down my cheeks as I realize I had lost the last bit of normal I had. Now I had no mom, a sad shadow of my dad, and no Wesley. Sure, Wesley wasn’t my one true love, but he had been my first love.
Mama dying had changed everything. Last December I had been away at college, taking my finals, when Dad called to tell me she had been in a car wreck. There had been no rushing home or to the hospital because she was already gone. I have taken this semester off to be home with my dad, but sometimes it feels like he is already gone, too. He is still quick to smile and always has a joke lined up, but it is as if he is living from behind a veil, the happiness never reaches his eyes. Sometimes I wonder if he is just going through the motions each day, just trying to make it to the next without falling apart. Sometimes that is how I feel, which is why losing Wesley is harder than it should be.
Wesleyhasbeen my one constant. My country-loving, small-town, high school sweetheart hasn’t changed a bit since Mama passed away. Heck, he hasn’t changed a bit since high school, including his tendency to flirt with other girls. It is probably for the best though. Wesley may have been the same, but I’m not.
The time off from school has given me a lot of time to reflect. Mama’s death had been sudden, which while tragic was also very fitting. Her favorite quote, which hung on one of those cliché placards above the kitchen window reads, “Harbor no regrets. Leave no I love you, I’m sorry, or thank you unsaid.” She had lived that to the end, and I want to honor her wisdom. I want to live without regrets, leaving nothing unsaid or undone.
The first step was transferring colleges. I had attended University of Alabama because Mama had loved her time there so much, but after a year there I hadn’t ever fallen in love the way she had. I have applied to several other universities and am patiently awaiting acceptance emails. All the universities I have applied to have one thing in common, they are far, far away from Willow Springs, Alabama, my home.
Willow Springs is a blip along the highway to most people, but to the six thousand of us that live here, it is everything. To someone that didn’t live here, it would be impossible to explain how a one red light town with little more than a grocery store and a gas station could mean so much, but to someone who lives here you wouldn’t need to explain. It is where we were born, all of us delivered by Dr. Johnson, the only doctor in town, where we grew up, going to the same schools our parents had, and where we all see ourselves eventually settling down the same way our parents and grandparents had done before us. It is a shared experience that runs so deep it has bonded generation after generation.
Dad isn’t from around here, but Mama was born and raised here. Grandma and Grandpa had lived down the street in the house she grew up in until they died. Uncle Tad, Mama’s brother, lives across town. That is the way of Willow Springs. You are born here, grow up, leave to make something of yourself, only to eventually make your way back to Willow Springs. Some might have thought it restrictive, but to most of us, it was a tradition. We always made our way back home. It was even what the town sign on the side of the highway said: Welcome Home.
Dad always joked that in that way, the people of Willow Springs were a lot like the salmon he used to watch spawn each fall growing up. Salmon hatch in the same spawning areas their parents had and when they get big enough, they venture out into the ocean only to mature and turn right back around fighting tooth and nail to go back where they were born just so they can have some kids and die. It sounds disturbingly familiar.
Regardless, before Mama died, Willow Springs had always been what I had wanted for myself. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere other than under the arms of the mature oak trees and by the side of the winding river. I always dreamed of one day getting married in the old chapel on main street, the same place Mama and Dad had gotten married, living in a farmhouse off a dirt road, and raising children in the same place and in the same way I was raised. Until Mama died, I wanted nothing different.
When Mama died, something changed, and while Willow Springs is still home and always will be, some small voice keeps whispering that I can’t find out who I am and what I want if I just follow in my parents’ footsteps. How can I know I want this life if it is the only life I’ve ever known? So, I will go out to the ocean as the salmon do and maybe like the salmon, I will end up back in Willow Springs all the same, but at least I will know. So that is my first step, to step out of my comfort zone and find where I belong in this world.
Truthfully, I haven’t thought past the first step, but I am pretty sure being dumped isn’t the second step. Swallowing my pity, I wash my face, letting myself think without all the hysterics. I am not in love with Wesley. That is a fact I have known since I left for college and cried not because I wouldn’t see Wesley for months, but because I wouldn’t be able to bring my chocolate lab, Sunny, with me. Getting out of my dead-end relationship was probably as good a second step as possible, even if it hurt a little.
Even though logically I know it is for the best, I still want this unintentional second step to be over. I don’t want to deal with the awkward run-ins with Wesley or his family members, and I am bound to see them in this small town. I don’t want to deal with the loneliness that will creep up on me when I come home from a shift at the diner and realize that no one is waiting for me. I don’t want to give up my favorite hoodie that I stole from him in high school.
Groaning, I realize all the stuff of his I have. A couple of games, several books, his digital camera, and that hoodie. I’m sure there is even more stuff I’m forgetting. You don’t date someone for three years without accumulating a bit of their stuff. I will have to see him again to return it. I guess I could just leave it on his parent’s porch, but I am better than that. I will return it with dignity. I won’t cower from Wesley. He did not break my heart the way he thinks he did.
That will be tomorrow’s problem, though. Tonight, I need to sleep. I change into some pajamas and snuggle underneath my covers and let myself list all that I had lost. Mama, then Dad, and now Wesley. I can’t get mama back and I don’t want Wesley back, but I will get my dad back. I need him. Guess that would be my step three. Get Dad back. I know it won’t be easy or quick, but I will do whatever it takes to see the light in Dad’s eyes again. Though late at night and emotionally worn, I have no ideas about how I will accomplish that. That will have to be tomorrow’s problem as well.
Chapter 2
