Chapter One
The bed was a complete and total mess.
The linens were rolled up in a bunch and shoved into the corner of the wall, making the floral pattern look like the flowers had been trampled on. The sun blasted her dusty farm town and streamed through the window on a hot day in August. The whole room baked with lingering heat. If only the air conditioner worked better.
One stroke of paint, and then another, and then another. The paint roller was dipped into the pan and one more swipe was given to the old smoke-stained walls.
“A-ha!” Evelyn smiled. “No more nasty crap. I finally get to have all the pink I want, all the flowers I want, all the…whatever I want!”
She tried to continue, but her arms and back were tiring. She sighed heavily, laid the roller in the pan, and flopped upon the bed. “I’ve been slaving away at this all day long. I think I’ll go bake some cookies and… Oh! I’m gonna watchmyfavorite movie, because I can!”
She left the room with nothing but a few strokes of paint on the wall, hardly enough to have been slaving away at it for ten minutes, let alone all day long.
A few batches of cookies later, she dropped onto the couch and snacked, trying to let the air-conditioning do what it needed to do. Eventhough she was thirty-eight years old, she had never been able to do whatever she wanted.
With a new job as a graphic designer after a brief stint in Los Angeles—a terrible mistake that was—she felt like the world was her oyster for the first time. The very,veryfirst time.
Her cell phone rang, playing a jingle from The Rolling Stones. It was her grandpa! Rolling her eyes in a smile, she picked it up. “Hey, Grandpa, what’s up?”
His gravelly voice came through, “Oh, I was wondering if you were going to take all of your stuff with you or if I can donate the rest of it.”
“No,” she said as she muted the TV. Grandpa’s accent was thick and heavy, like a billowing plume of tobacco mixed with moonshine. Sometimes she could hardly understand him, even though she had previously lived with him for ten years. Growing up in the boot hill did that to him.
There was a bit of a pause, and she chuckled. “Pawpaw, you still there?”
More silence followed.
“Pawpaw?”
Then she heard him gasping.
“Pawpaw?”
“I…” he stammered.
The gasping was getting louder and harder. He sounded like he was going to cry or something worse.
She sprung to her feet and bellowed, “I’m calling an ambulance!”
“N-no,” he stammered back.
She listened and then…
He sneezed.
She pulled the phone away from the earth-shattering sound. It was so sudden and bursting that instinctively she wiped the side of her cheek. She could have sworn there was snot spray there.
She held her chest and laughed. “Damn, Pawpaw, don’t scare me like that! Take your freaking Allegra.”
“Oh, it ain’t that, baby, and you know it,” he giggled merrily. A cough followed. Then another sneeze riot.
“I think Daddy got the same sneeze orchestra from you.”
“He sure did!” he said in a laugh.
“Now, you know I can’t come back and forth seven times a day to pick my stuff up. I gotta take time.”
“I wanna know why you won’t let your old pawpaw help you. I got that ol’ Chevy that’s been collecting dust for too long.”
