It’s me.
My ego pleased I still have it, I smile at her, but then I notice something about her that makes my heart skip a beat. She looks so much like someone from my past.
Someone from back there, back where I left.
But that’s impossible.
CHAPTER THREE
Connor
All the way home,I try not to think about that woman, but it’s like her face is tattooed on my brain. Dark hair. Big sunglasses. Straight, white teeth like she wore braces for years when she was young.
No, that’s impossible. My mind is playing tricks on me. She couldn’t have been standing in the self-checkout area of my neighborhood grocery store. She’s dead.
This is because I let my mind go back to that night all those years ago. I knew this would happen sometime. My brain would get the best of me, and then I’d be fixated on all that happened. Dammit! I’ve been so good for so long. Why is this happening now?
I pull into the driveway as I decide it’s stress. Work has been a fucking bear lately. Between those two new guys coming out of the gate and making sales most of us haven’t seen in two or three years and my boss Martin practically breathing down all our backs to do better this quarter, I’ve been a huge ball of stress from head to toe.
And Jamie hasn’t been much help. Between her saying we need to find a new school for the girls since they’ve outgrown their current gymnastics teacher, which means I’ll have to fork over more money for those damn sessions each week, and her claiming we need to hire a landscaper to make the yard look as good as all our neighbors’ yards, I’ve had to listen to a near constant stream of we need talk for the past month or so.
Yes, it’s definitely stress. My mind is playing tricks on me. I couldn’t have seen who I thought I saw. Not possible. Dead people don’t hang out at the grocery store.
I chuckle at that idea and silently joke to myself that they don’t use self-checkout either. A dead person would definitely use a regular checkout. I mean, if they’re dead, the last thing they want to do is scan their own damn items. Hell, most living people don’t want to do that.
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I close my eyes and take a deep breath. The stress is getting to me. I need to get my head together. In two minutes, I have to deal with my wife and eight screaming girls. It was just my mind playing games with me. That’s it.
After grabbing the four grocery bags, I head into the house where my daughters and all their friends have set up camp in the living room. I level my gaze on Jamie as if to ask, “Why the hell aren’t they outside?” but she doesn’t understand my look and simply hurries over to grab the bags out of my hands.
“Girls, look what Mr. Jennings got! Ice cream, gummy bears, the works! Let’s get this party started!” she squeals, and I swear she sounds just like one of the preteens surrounding me.
That gets eight girls even more excited and jumping up and down. As I look on in horror while they rush into the kitchen, I have to wonder if they really need more sugar.
What I need is to get the hell away from this before the headache that started forming on the drive home explodes into afull-on throbbing migraine. With a quick wave, I hurry upstairs to change my shoes. By the time I sit down on the edge of the bed, I feel trapped in my own home. I could go downstairs to my home office, but all that goddamned yelling is going to make concentrating on anything impossible. Even all the way up here I can hear them.
Three thousand square feet of house that I pay far too much of my salary for each month and I’m stuck hiding out in my bedroom in order to get some peace and quiet. Someone remind me again why having kids is such a joy.
Jamie interrupts my attempt at silence, bursting into the bedroom like some frantic chicken. “Oh, Connor! The party is such a hit! This is going to help the girls so much. You watch!” she squeals as she searches the room for something.
“Great. What are you looking for?”
She spins around, and I see her hands full of the towels she bought a few months ago that cost a fortune. “I need more towels for the girls.”
“What’s wrong with the beach towels they’ve been using for the past couple hours? Why do they need our good towels?”
Stopping in front of me, she shakes her head as her eyes fill with tears. What the hell is she so emotional about? I merely asked about towels.
“Don’t you want your girls to be popular? Their friends are going to tell their parents about what they saw at our house, and I don’t want them saying that they had to use those beach towels the whole time they were here. Don’t worry. I’ll wash them after they’re done.”
I watch her scurry away as I shake my head in disbelief. I don’t understand her. Are these darlings too good for beach towels?
Whatever. I can’t be bothered to dissect my wife’s thinking. Let her deal with all of them and all of the nonsense involved with impressing their parents.
Maybe I can get out on the links for a few holes of golf so I can escape all of this. My temporary moment of hope is dashed when I remember hearing that there wasn’t a tee time available until two weekends from now. Something about the club inviting in more members creating a backlog on reservations.
So that shoots down that idea. I need to think of something to get me as far away from a house full of girls as possible.
My mind remains blank for a few minutes as the yelping from downstairs makes thinking next to impossible. Jesus, don’t these girls ever stop? You’d swear someone was strangling them in my living room.
