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“You like him?”
“No…yes.”
She studied me a moment longer. “Well, don’t stand here all day, I made those pancakes to be eaten.”
Startled, I looked at the pancakes in my hand and then up at her, still feeling slightly on the back foot.
“Fresh berries and some cream may help,” she said as she studied the book in front of her.
Peering closer, I felt my cheeks redden. “Janice, I told you not to read my books!”
“Get your stuff and off you go. I’m busy.”
Gathering everything I needed, I slapped a twenty on the counter, and muttering to myself, I headed to the small local butcher.
We were a small town; we were lucky to have the butcher really. A lot of the folks still caught and killed their own. But personally, I didn’t need to be that up close and personal with my meat.
Having stalled in town long enough, I got back in the truck and headed home. When I got there, Mark was gone. I almost flew into a panic until I spotted his backpack, and calming down, I quickly put away my groceries and then headed outside. Where would he have gone?
Thinking about the area, which I had known all my life, I immediately had several scenarios where he was dead and lying at the bottom of a ravine. Calming myself, I rationalised that he’d taken a walk. Picking a direction, I went with it and hoped my gut served me well. I followed the road up, past the guesthouse, and climbed slowly higher.
I’d been walking for almost twenty minutes, sure I had made a mistake and almost giving up, when I saw him. I would have missed him if I hadn’t stopped to enjoy the view while I debated about my choices. His blond hair caught the sunlight, and I headed over to him, to the small ledge he was sitting on, just staring down at everything below us.
“Hey?” I greeted.
Mark looked up at me, not surprised to see me, and I saw his hesitant smile. “Hi.”
“You can’t leave a note?” I asked as I sat beside him.
“I… Were you worried?”
“You’re in a place you don’t know, you’ve had a crappy couple of days, you disappear? Yes, Mark, I was worried.”
“Oh.” He looked out over the mountain again. “Sorry.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. I wasn’t,” he told me, “for a long time. But I am now.” He smiled as he faced outwards again.
“We talking about the here and now?” I asked him softly.
“I finished top of my class. I worked hard my four years of college, and then I did my graduate degree straight after. Twenty-four, I was ready to take the world by storm. Got a great job, could afford a nice apartment, worked solid for my first three years. No vacation, no weekends, I made a portfolio to be envied.” He moved slightly, and I watched him as he watched his surroundings. “Had the fiancée,” he told me with a sideways glance. “Who wanted the holidays to be with family, who wanted the weekends to be doing things, who ended up wanting my co-worker more than me, even though I had been building everything up for us.” He shrugged, but I could hear the bitterness. “I mean, I don’t blame her, not really. I was a dead end. A machine, she called me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said as I reached out and touched his hand gently.
“Her leaving me, it stopped me working. I thought of everything I had done for the last nine years, and what did I have to show for it? An empty apartment and an empty life.”
“I think you’re being hard on yourself,” I said quietly.
“It hit me hard. You don’t even know you’re drowning until you’re already sinking. I went to a doctor, and I went to a shrink. I’ve taken the tablets, the remedies. I even did meditation, I did it all. My mom bought me a dog.” He smiled as he looked at his phone and showed me his screensaver, and an adorable chocolate-coloured puppy with ears flapping and tongue hanging out, obviously caught mid-leap, stared back.
“Oh wow, she’s gorgeous.”
“Yeah, she really is. And demanding, and when she wants to go walkies at five thirty in the morning in the park and I’m too lazy to get up, she burrows her head into my neck and licks because she hates being ignored.”
My face flushed, and when he turned to look at me, he smiled sadly. “I fucked up, Iris. I have a good job, but I think I may have lost the passion I had for it. I have a shit sleeping pattern, and I’m constantly watched by my family in case I stop treading water, so they gave me a dog to look after so I had something to depend on me.”
“You’re being really hard on yourself right now,” I chided him gently.
