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At some point in the middle of the night, he responded.
Evan: I made a huge mistake.
Evan: I want you back.
And then again early in the morning…
Evan: Can we talk, Mel?
At least the ball was back in my court now. I could leave him on ‘read’ like I should have done the night before. I certainly wasn’t going to entertain anything he was saying…Was I?
No, I couldn’t. I was desperate the night before, that was all. He caught me at a weak, drunken moment.
My heart froze with a dangerous thought. What if the same thing had happened to him? It had been too easy for me to get blackout drunk the night before and make the mistake of talking to him. It didn’t seem fair to compare what I had been going through to the stress of Evan’s ordinary day to day, but I had been pressuring him about marriage. He knew I was waiting for him to propose. Maybe under all that stress, he had too much to drink. He crossed the line with Natasha and thought it was too late to go back.
I collapsed back against the couch with a groaning whine. Before receiving the devastating news about my mom, I spent weeks obsessing over Evan’s motivations. I would cry and lament and question every tiny little thing. I thought my mom’s death had been a wake-up call to snap out of it, but there I was. Sitting in her house, which I had to focus on, to make major decisions about. And yet, I had slipped right back into the rollercoaster of emotions and total mind warp that only Evan could inspire in me.
I knew I couldn’t consider talking to him, and I definitely couldn’t even begin to think about taking him back. I wanted to throw my phone across the room, but I thought better of it since I didn’t recall seeing a cell phone repair shop on the way in. Instead, I stuffed it under a couch cushion and tried to forget Evan or the phone existed.
I stood up and brushed my hands together, wiping them clean. “That’s that. Now listen up,” I said to myself. “You’re going to go into the kitchen, make a nice strong pot of coffee, and figure out what the hell to do with this house.”
* * *
DEREK
Keithand I piled into my truck with our tools and headed to the next job. We hadn’t been driving long before he just had to divulge his opinions about Ms. Melody Hart.
“She’s a strange one, isn’t she?” He clicked his tongue and shook his head. “That poor house…No, her poormom. She let that place waste away while her big city daughter went on living her life, with no regard for her mother’s well-being or the things she owned. Now she’s just going to sell it off and forget it ever existed. She obviously doesn’t care a thing about it.”
I kept driving and didn’t say a word. I knew what it looked like. I had a few of the same thoughts myself, but I also hated how everyone around this town gossiped. And I never did like judging people I knew next to nothing about.
“Did you see how expensive her clothes looked?” he scoffed. “All that money, and she still can’t be bothered to hang onto a house to pass through the generations of her family. Like what we have, with Granddad’s place.”
“Not everyone’s like us.”
“A lot of good that money seems to be doing her anyway. She looked like she was crying, and she was obviously hungover.”
“Her mother just died,” I reminded him.
“All the more reason to do what’s right and see to it that her house is taken care of, don’t ya think? But no, she can’t wait to skip town and get back to her big fancy city the first chance she gets.”
“New York is just a city, like any other,” I laughed. “It’s got rats and pollution and trash. There’s hardly anything fancy about it.”
“Exactly! All the more reason to stay here at least long enough to look after her mother’s things,” he argued.
I wanted to let it go, but I knew he’d just keep on about it if I didn’t find some way to put it to rest for good.
“Grief is a funny thing,” I sighed after a while. “It strikes people in different ways. There’s more to these kinds of things than meets the eye. That woman is obviously in a bad way, and she’s just dealing with it the best way she knows how. That’s all any of us can do.”
“Ah, you’re just sticking up for her because you think she’s pretty,” he decided, waving me off. “But hey, I’m glad you’re giving some thought to what I said the other day.”
“I assure you, I’m not,” I answered dryly. “I’m not interested in her or anything like that.”
“Well, maybe you should be,” he suggested with a sly tone to his voice.
I glanced over at him in disbelief. “You just got done bashing her for being a ‘big city girl’ who doesn’t care about her family!”
“I know, but hear me out. I’m not saying you have to make her your girlfriend or marry the woman or anything like that. But there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun. You know, a fling. Just something to liven you up a bit.”
