I love my family, but my mother has a serious case of “I told you so” syndrome that I’m happy to be away from most days. She never liked Barry and hasn’t wasted an opportunity to remind me of the fact now that we’re not married.
“Are you planning to buy a house here?”
“Possibly?” That’s a weird question. “Why?”
Nate spins the laptop around and on the screen are the images of a house I’d been looking at a few hours before the accident.
“Hey! That’s my laptop.” And my house. I hadn’t gotten the chance to even set up a second showing yet and now with unknown medical bills, the house-buying prospect is fading away. But still, laptops are private. I’m not ready to share my dreams with Nate.
He pulls the computer back to his side of the table. “I didn’t think you’d mind if I checked my email.”
“But you didn’tjustcheck your email. You snooped through my stuff.”
“It was open in the browser.” He laughs, but I don’t find it funny at all.
Emma cries, upset by my raised voice, and I stand up quickly to grab her without considering my hurt ankle. My knee hits the underside of the table and pain shoots up from my foot.
“Owww,” I cry before sitting down hard.
Nate leaps from his chair coming to my side. His hands rest on my shoulders as I breathe trying to get the pain under control. “You need to be on the couch propping up your ankle.”
“But Emma,” I protest as he tries to help me stand.
“Let me take care of you. Then I’ll get her.” His voice is soft and full of wonderful promises, but he’s clueless on what he’s volunteering himself for when it comes to Emma.
Boredom kicksitself into high gear about two hours later as I contemplate counting the number of speckles on my apartment’s tiled ceiling. I’m not great at sitting still and doing nothing, which is what a serious sprain requires you to do. Thankfully, the doctors promised it at least wasn’t a break. But a sprain is still a sprain, and until I’m able to get around better without searing pain shooting up my leg, I’m on desk duty.
Except desk duty is the couch in my living room with my foot propped up on a pillow over the coffee table. I hate being helpless. Yes, I agree with the doctors about being glad it wasn’t broken. A twisted knee and sprained ankle are better than a break, but it’s still a nuisance. He said a full two weeks off it, but by then the Disney Jr. theme song will cause me to lose my mind.
I also don’t like the fact that practically a stranger — the same one who hit me with a truck — is watching my child play with blocks on the floor. He was the one to chase after her the last time the toilet flushed when neither of us were using the room, and most recently he ran off to figure out why it was so quiet in the hallway before he could drop off the laptop. At least if I had my laptop I could work.
I need the money, but I’m also concerned about my job. The Environmental Quality Office in Clearwater is understaffed at the moment, and the more work I get done from my couch the better. I don’t have enough hours at my part-time job to qualify for FMLA, and my inability to make it to the office for the next two weeks — until I get better at getting myself around — means I’m back to living off my savings account.
When I left Barry, I promised myself I’d never depend on someone else again, but that’s what I am right now. At Barry’s urging, I’d quit my job when I gave birth to Emma and believed all his lies about taking care of me for the rest of my life. It was such a wonderful idea—one I wanted so badly to be true.
There’s a knock on the front door, the sound echoing from the living room of my apartment. The problem is, everything echoes in this apartment and half the time I get up to answer the door, it’s someone knocking on a neighbor’s door. Then I looked like the weirdo spying on everyone else in my hallway.
“Nate,” I yell, hopeful it’ll be him wasting his time going to check.
Hey, if he’s here at my disposal I might as well use him. He hit me with his truck after all.
He doesn’t answer. The last sound I heard from the hallway was the giggles of a two-year-old who figured out she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t. Fear refused to let me ask what she’d done now.
The knock comes again and this time it’s obviously from my apartment when the door rattles against the frame. With more effort than it should require, I find my crutches and plop my leg down from the pillow, making my way from the couch. It better be worth it. Like a huge ass box from Amazon with buckets of cash.
Except when I open the door, I’m met face-to-face with the last person I want to see. Now that I’m not madly in love with him, it’s easy to see his flaws. Nose too big for his face, the balding spot on the back of his head, which I can’t see from my angle but is there, and eyebrows that if he doesn’t get ahold of them soon, he’ll resemble a fuzzy caterpillar at a rave within the next five years.
“Barry.” I try to greet him like you would greet anyone you’ve known for a lifetime but hate in the most abrasive way. However, I’m only able to pull off irritated. It’s been a long day.
He takes a step into my apartment, his eyes on the boot covering my foot. “Josie, I heard the news, but wasn’t sure it was true.” His cologne, old man spice, fills the area around him. How did I once find it attractive? Nate has his own woods smell, like he sleeps with pine trees, and while I’ve never been a woods girl, I’d sniff him all day.
“What news is that?” My mind fills with lots of newsworthy bits he might have heard. How much I can’t stand looking at him. How I hate he’s breathing my air. Or that I’ve envisioned it was him being hit by a truck more times than is legal. I mean seriously, how is it he’s the one who cheats, but I’m the one hit by a truck? Karma really is a bitch.
“Your Aunt Millie called and said you had an accident. Almost broke your ankle.”
Oh, he’s here aboutthatnews. Damn Aunt Millie. She was the one person on my side of the family who liked Barry. I always wondered if she’d flip and provide information for him. There was no other explanation for how he found out where Emma and I moved after first coming to Pelican Bay. I had to tell him eventually, only he showed up to inspect our new apartment and double check for safety the day we moved. I realized at that point I had a mole in the family.
“Yes, I hurt my ankle, but I’m not dead if that’s what you hoped. You could have called rather than drive all the way here.”
