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My eyebrows shot up. “Good going, Andrea.”
Bobby pocketed his phone and looked past me, his eyes moving rapidly right and left while he contemplated the situation. “Yeah,” he said.
“Hey, man, that’s a good thing,” I said. “You want her out of that.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Bobby said, shaking the stupor out of him. “I just didn’t expect it. She seemed so strung up on that asshole, I figured the only time she’d call me was to tell me she was in the hospital.”
“I get it,” I said. “But she isn’t.”
“No, she isn’t,” Bobby nodded.
“You’re supposed to be happy about this.”
Bobby looked at me, through me even, lost in his thoughts. “No, I am, really,” he assured me. “It’s just very much out of the blue. And in the middle of the night. I think she just packed her things and left.”
“Good.”
“Yeah, until he follows her.”
I smiled. “When he does, we’ll be here waiting,” I said. “I’ve put one wife beater into a wheelchair. I have no problems doing it again.”
Chapter 5: Andrea
He’s going to kill me. He’s going to find some way to catch up to me and kill me.
The thought wouldn’t leave my head. Even with my foot pushing down on the gas, knowing that Dennis would be too drunk to follow me tonight at least, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was just a few cars behind me. I tried to calm myself down, sticking to the speed limit as best as I could. I didn’t need to be pulled over; not now, not while I was running.
My only wish was that I reach Mansfield before I ran out of courage. A few miles back, a part of me had wanted to turn around and go home. Deal with a drunkard and his beatings, go to sleep with bruises I could hopefully hide, and then head to work the next morning as if nothing had happened. It would be easier dealing with Dennis’s wrath now than later. If he put two and two together, if he came looking for me in Mansfield, he’d be in the mood for more than just a beating.
Bobby will protect me. I can count on Bobby.
Only, my brother didn’t really sound so convinced himself. I had stopped for gas when I called him, and his voice had sounded a little too anxious for my liking. I would have thought he’d be ecstatic about my leaving Dennis. Maybe even throw me a welcome home party or something. Instead, I got the stuttered reply of someone who wasn’t too sure if I was doing the right thing or not. Which worried me. A lot.
I gripped the steering wheel tighter and tried to fight the urge to look in the rearview mirror every five seconds. The voice inside my head was telling me that there was no way Dennis could catch up to me now. That I was too far gone for that to happen, and besides, it would take him hours before he could think straight. But he wasn’t stupid. He’d know the first place I’d go to would be Mansfield. It would only be a matter of time before he came looking for me.
He thinks you’re on bad terms with your family. He might not think to follow you home.
Oh, who the fuck was I kidding?
I only started to relax when I drove past the large billboard welcoming me to Mansfield, home of the University of Connecticut, population almost 27,000. It was only then that I noticed my heart had been beating on overdrive, and now that I felt I was safe and had begun to calm down, it was starting to slow its pace and announce its anger with shooting pain in my chest. I fought to keep my hands steady and the car on the road, the adrenaline coursing through me diminishing to a point where my body was starting to slowly shut down. I didn’t stop, though. I knew that if I did, I’d break down in tears and probably never make the last few miles home.
Mansfield hadn’t changed much from the last time I had been here. It was the middle of the spring semester, and students were everywhere, even this late at night. I had to admit, it kept the town pretty lively, although I missed the old days when I could recognize every face I passed by in the street.
The closer I got to home, the calmer I felt. I drove down Storrs Road at a leisurely pace, no longer constantly checking the rear-view mirror for signs of Dennis following me. I even began to smile a little as I turned down Spring Hills Road, my eyes welling up with tears, my hands now shaking uncontrollably. By the time I reached the house, I was crying freely. I parked in the driveway behind Bobby’s truck, turned off the ignition, and rested my head against the steering wheel. I wrapped my arms around my shoulders and let the waterworks flow.
For the first time in forever, I felt good.
I don’t know how long I stayed like that, but when I finally looked up, Bobby was making his way to me, and thankfully with a wide smile on his face. I opened the door, climbed out and broke into tears again when he wrapped his arms around me. I cried like I had never cried before, and suddenly felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. The fear that I was making a mistake, the dread of Dennis looking for me and eventually finding me, all that slipped away like a bad dream.
“Hey, easy,” Bobby whispered, pressing me tighter into his embrace. “You’re okay. You’re home.”
That only made me cry harder.
***
“So, what happened?”
We were sitting in the kitchen, a hot mug of coffee nestled between my hands, and the gentle sound of Sinatra on the radio. It took me back to when I was ten or eleven, when my father would be attempting to cook me breakfast before I had to race off to school. Looking at Bobby now, resting against the kitchen counter with his arms folded across his chest, the similarity was uncanny. He had grown into the one man I had let down the most in my life.
