Begin Again: Short stories from the heart (2 page)

Enter, psychologist, Sara Hamilton, a woman who has known her own share of grief and loss and may just be the one person who can help Matt redefine his new world. Sara is every woman's woman—she's not a toothpick or a Cosmo girl, has never been prom queen, or dated the blond-haired god with the big white teeth. She's honest and decent and real...and lives on the perimeter, applauding her patients' successes, nursing them through their failures, but never acknowledging or accepting her own
lackings
. She's loved and lost once and has been so emotionally scarred, she's not willing to risk those feelings again.

Of course, she's never met a man like Matt Brandon. As Matt and Sara explore the delicate balance between 'blind' trust and hope, they will discover that sometimes you have to lose everything to find what you are truly looking for...

It is late afternoon and I am peeling potatoes for dinner. The dryer thumps in methodical cadence while
Black Eyed Peas
hammers my brain from the floor above.

I set down the peeler, stare at my hands. The knuckles are chapped, the nails short, the cuticles rough. Eighteen years have stolen the sparkle from the ring on my left hand. I should take it to the jeweler’s but there is always a list and never an end.

I should clean the corner behind the stool where the dog hair piles up in black fluffy clouds, vacuum the furnace grates, suck up the tiny stones and bits of dirt—and more dog hair. I should sew the last seven patches on the Girl Scout vest so there will be no more snippy remarks about another meeting passed without patches. I should buy bread — unsliced Italian in a brown bag—the kind he likes with beef soup. And I should definitely go to the basement, right now, hop on the treadmill and walk, beginner level, fifteen minutes,
no
incline. I scratch my knuckles. They begin to bleed.
Jergens
Intensive Care, that’s what I should really do.

I should do all of these things, perhaps at least some of them.
Maybe even one.

And I should care that I have not.

I grab the potato
peeler,
clutch it so hard my thumb hurts. I want to scream,
I am done with the taking, the expecting, the crowding
, but I cannot let it come out. I sink further into indifference, my own and theirs.

And I do not even care.

But I did care once, when I had a brain that calculated more complicated tasks than the number of potatoes that serves four for vegetable soup, back when I had something to say that didn’t end in discipline or disappointment.
Or disillusionment.

I want my life back
. It is a faint whisper rustling through my body.

No one hears because they are too busy with their own needs, their own perceived emergencies, to see I am dying, breath by breath, right in front of them. Even he is deaf to my quiet pleas. Do I not speak loudly enough, or clearly enough, or with enough conviction? Do I not understand what it is I am asking for? Is there no room for
asking,
only taking? How would I begin to take when I have been the giver for so long? And what would I take?
Time?
Peace?
Energy?

The garage door opens signaling his arrival. 5:20. Dinner is always at 5:30. I get up, walk to the stove,
stir
the soup.

I dream at night, only I think they are not dreams at all, these long imaginings of myself laughing, talking, smoothing my hair back from my face—smiling. I am thinking these things outside of sleep, thinking this is how I want my life to be, how it should be. How I need it to be. And then, he says, “Did you remember to pay the line of credit today?”

I do not open my eyes. “Yes.”

“Good. Thanks.”

I start to drift back to the place of my imaginings, where I am happy, at peace.

“You feel wonderful.” His fingers move down my hip.
“So soft.”
He brushes his lips over my temple.

I know this dance, each step, each turn, each gasp, in darkness or light it is all the same. I reach up, turn out the light.

I do not open my eyes. I do not need to. It is all the same.

The End

Suffocating in Suburbia
embodies a woman’s struggle with her life of discontent. She has a husband, children, a home, but somewhere along the way, she has lost herself. I wrote
this story years
before I penned
Not Your Everyday Housewife
, which many know sprang from the time period when I had my mother recuperating in my living room from a fall where she fractured her
humerus
, and which necessitated me sleeping on the couch for a month. The morning my mother returned from the emergency room, my then sixteen-year-old daughter was hospitalized, (different hospital), with pneumonia. It was a period of time with too many teenagers in the house and during which I decided to write a wry and humorous take on life after forty, which included blubber, exes, and starting over. Many readers tell me they recognize themselves in this tale. Yes, it might be a bit over the top, but it was the best prescription I could write at the time and I am always delighted to share it with others.

Not
Your
Everyday Housewife

A wise and humorous tale of living large after 40 as women finally make peace with themselves— wrinkles, blubber, neuroses, exes, and all.

Three women embark on a month long ‘discovery’ journey and uncover quite a few tidbits along the way … one bottle of Clairol Midnight will not cover a full head of red hair, and never talk to men wearing polyester pants hiked up with a tan belt. But most of what they unearth is
about themselves—who they are, what they really want, what they really DON'T want. The center of controversy is a Maid-for-You mixer which symbolizes a boring, routine suburban life with NO second chances—then along comes insight in the form of Tula Rae, a sixty-something Salsa dancing, Dalai Lama quoting, four-time widow in spandex and a gray braid who gives them a different perspective on life, love, do-overs and the real reason a man buys his woman a Maid-for-You mixer, (which she says is all about S-E-X.)

Suffocating in Suburbia also planted the idea for
Pieces of You
, Book One of
The Betrayed Trilogy.
The mother in this story,
Evie
Burnes
, drives to the grocery story in the small town where she lives and disappears. What she leaves behind is a family struggling to deal with what has happened and a son who discovers the horrible truth behind her disappearance. This truth leaves him scarred and incapable of trusting anyone. The overview follows, but many readers say they don’t understand the mother’s choice, feel it’s selfish, hurtful, and truly dislike her. I have children and can’t even contemplate such an act. Yet, this woman does. When book three of
The Betrayed Trilogy
is available, I will release a novella about
Evie
Burnes
and the life she led before the disappearance. It will be a culmination of sorts for readers who have many questions.

Pieces of You

Sometimes hiding in the shadows is the only way to protect your heart.

Quinn
Burnes’s
mother disappeared when he was only fifteen leaving him with a despondent father, a little sister who suffers panic attacks, and eight notebooks containing the truth about his mother. He guards this secret for eighteen years, until on an otherwise normal day, his mother re-enters his life, pleading for his help. She’s in danger and the only thing that can save her is reclaiming the identity she shunned years ago.

Quinn is a master of emotional detachment, from his successful career as a personal injury attorney to his strings of meaningless relationships with beautiful women who possess uneasy temperaments; a sure formula to keep his heart safe and insure he’s the first to walk away. Until he meets the mysterious ‘Danielle’ a woman with too many secrets who’s on the run from the abusive estranged husband she shot and may have killed. Danielle isn’t like any woman he’s ever met, but can he risk his heart for someone who’s doing exactly what his mother did eighteen years ago? Someone who may ultimately leave him, just like his mother?

Jack Torrence threw down his pencil.
Damn!
How could Richard do this to him when he was so close? He’d worked on this project for six months. But the
dream
had been his since he was a kid, growing up on the grimy graffiti-filled streets of East Cleveland.

None of that mattered now. Richard
Deeling
, President of
Deeling
& Associates, wanted him to turn the project over. He’d called Jack ‘too valuable an asset’ to be tied up any longer waiting for construction to start.

So Jack wouldn’t get the pleasure of being involved firsthand as his dream emerged, five stories of mortar and concrete, housing some of the country’s most sought after historical artifacts.

He was out—period. The worst part of the whole deal was that Richard actually expected him to train the new architect, some upstart from New York. And that didn’t sit well at all.

He pushed back his chair, flung open the side drawer of the mahogany desk and grabbed three red-tipped darts.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
The darts smothered the small red circle in the middle of the board.

Soon, he’d have to meet the new guy, Sam Whitcomb, and act as though he didn’t mind turning over his dream project to a stranger. Jack snatched two more darts.
Wham!
Dead center.
He cocked his hand to launch the last one.

“Excuse me. I’m looking for Mr. Torrence.”

Jack’s hand jerked, sending the dart soaring through the air to crash land on the outer rim of the board. His gaze riveted toward the voice. A tall leggy brunette stood in the doorway staring at him. Whitcomb’s secretary
.
Great.
He’d had to share the Wicked Witch of the West with two other architects and this guy Whitcomb flew in his ultra chic, designer-clad secretary who looked like she’d just finished a cover shoot for
Vogue
.

“Mr. Torrence?”

Jack’s gaze narrowed. Why did she have to speak in that soft throaty voice? Why couldn’t she have a monotone pitch?
Something flat and unfeminine?
More like the Wicked Witch of the West’s nasal twang?

“Excuse me, are you Mr. Torrence?”

“Yeah, that’s me.” He rose to retrieve the darts and caught a whiff of mint and lavender. Not only did she look good, have a killer voice that pinched his senses, but she smelled good, too. The Wicked Witch of the West smelled like cough drops. He’d have to talk to Richard about getting a secretary like this one, or maybe he and Whitcomb could share her services. He liked that idea.
A lot.
Jack relaxed a little and actually smiled at Whitcomb’s secretary. “Why don’t you take a seat in the reception area and I’ll see if anyone’s seen Whitcomb?”
Nothing like playing secretary for the secretary.

The leggy brunette opened her mouth to speak when a flurry of activity in the outer room stopped her. A young pixie of a woman with spiky red hair and a matching jumper rushed forward, nearly bumping into the new secretary.

“I’m so sorry I’m late. I got stuck in traffic and I’m not used to the area, and I took a left when I should have taken a right and—”

“It’s all right, Jesse.” Whitcomb’s secretary shot a dazzling smile at her.

“Who are
you
?” Jack stared at the pixie waif.

Miss Red-Hair-Red-Jumper shrank against the door. “Jessie Hastings, the new secretary.”

“New secretary?”
Jack shot a look at the other woman standing in the doorway. Something was very wrong. “If she’s the new secretary, who are you?”

The leggy brunette stepped forward and extended a well-manicured hand. “I’m Samantha Whitcomb.”

***

The morning’s misunderstanding escalated into full-scale warfare by mid-afternoon. Jack Torrence disagreed with everything that came out of Sam’s mouth, from her list of construction crews to her choice for lunch. How could a man nix Italian? Heaven’s sake, she’d even offered to pay and he’d still declined.

When she accepted the assignment, she’d known getting Jack Torrence on her side would be the biggest obstacle.
Huge to be more exact.
Maybe even monumental.
But not impossible.
The man might be surly, uncommunicative, and demanding, and she might want to strangle him, but she refused to let him see he was getting to her.

“Mr. Torrence,” she practiced her most agreeable voice, “I think we have a problem.”
And it’s called,
You
!