Chapter 8
When the doorbell rang, Gail groaned, fully prepared to not answer it, but it didn’t stop.
She figured it had to be her father, but she was building up enough temper to deal with him now as well.
Too bad he didn’t arrive after her breakup call with Peter.
She’d had enough fury then. She thought about calling the police to get him to go away, and then she heard the voice behind the pounding on the door and froze.
It was not either of the two people she’d expected.
“Let me in,” Riley called out to her.
She got up, opened the door, and stared at him in shock. He stepped past, and she immediately moved back, realizing a huge dog was at his side. “Oh my God,” she cried out, dropping down to hug the dog. “You found him!”
The dog immediately swept to her, tail wagging, as if immediately hearing a kindred spirit entering his world.
She gave him a cuddle and got a complete face wash in return.
She laughed and laughed and realized just how much of a release this opportune meeting gave her.
Then the big happy dog knocked her over and halfway sat on her belly.
She looked up at Riley with a bemused look. “Seriously? This is a big bad War Dog?”
He grinned at her and shrugged. “Dogs are a great judge of character.”
Immediately her smile fell away, and she muttered, “That’s just because he doesn’t know me well enough.”
He shook his head. “You can beat yourself up,” he suggested, “or you can come to terms with it and be a better person for it. The tip is to start moving forward, not to look into your past. I learned that in rehab.”
She blinked, and he frowned. He closed the door behind them, took off his boots as if he planned to stay a while, and asked, “Do you have any coffee? I could really use a cup.”
Then he looked down at his pants and around at the perfect furniture, then frowned. “Actually, as you can see, I’m a little on the dirty side, so maybe I shouldn’t even be in here.”
She shrugged and added, “Everything washes.”
“Not the couches,” he argued, pointing to her off-white couch, and the immaculate centerpiece that was also ash-white. “As always, everything in your world is picture-perfect.”
It was a phrase that she had just used with her mom. She hopped up, trying hard to hide her face, because the tears were threatening to roll. “As it turns out, nothing in my world is picture-perfect,” she declared, “at least not anymore.”
“If you have a blanket,” he offered, “I could put that atop one of the cushions, and then I don’t have to worry about it.”
She immediately nodded, grabbed a blanket. As soon as she put it down, the dog—who she recognized as Cain, although they hadn’t been formally introduced—jumped up and lay down with a heavy deep sigh, as if he was finally safe now.
Riley chuckled. “I guess that guy’s plum tuckered out too and obviously was used to a blanket. So … I might need my own blanket,” he suggested, with a smile.
She immediately grabbed another one, also easily washable, and placed it beside Cain. The War Dog stretched out a paw, as if claiming that one too, but Riley sat down beside the dog, who was nudging him now.
“No way, buddy. Gotta share. This one’s mine.” He gently stroked the dog’s head.
She looked at the two of them and didn’t know what to say.
Still playing with Cain, he announced, “Your sister called me.” Gail stared at him, some of the warmth fading from her face, and he added, “I had just gotten out of the tunnels.”
Immediately she asked him, “Did you have any … luck?”
He laughed as he pointed at Cain. “I think Cain would say so.”
She shook her head. “Seriously? He was there with you?”
“Well, he was there, and the with me part came later. But he was down there and struggling in many ways,” he shared.
“Cain was in a bricked-up section, but there was another way out, so I think he was there as a watchdog—at least until they figured out what to do with him. I took the decision away from them,” he declared, as he explained how he’d gotten the dog out of the bricked-in spot in the tunnel, and both of them escaped in a Zodiac.
She stared at him in surprise and then shook her head. “I had no idea your life was so exciting.”
He chuckled. “It wasn’t. It was pretty laid-back and calm, but I wasn’t about to let this guy stay there, not when he was so happy to see me and so eager to get out.”
With no room on the couch for her now, she sat down on the floor to pet Cain.
Riley offered, “I can move the dog.”
“Oh no, I think he’s been through enough.”
He stared at her and nodded. “I forgot that you were such an animal lover.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, “and may be getting worse. I volunteer at one of the local rescues a couple days a week if I can,” she shrugged, tucking back her hair, “but one day for sure. I often take the animals out for a walk or just spend time loving on them.”
He nodded at that. “Seems like it’s a tough world for animals right now.”
She nodded. “It’s a tough world for everybody.”
“Yeah, I can’t argue that.”
Finally she looked up at him and asked, “What did Debbie say to you?”
“Something to the effect that you had just blown up your life and that you may not really understand just how bad the repercussions were to what you were doing. She was pretty worried about you.”
Gail shrugged. “Debbie may be right as I’m not sure I really do understand how bad this will be with my family involved,” she admitted. “Yet I am absolutely certain that I am doing the right thing.”
He stared at her, letting her speak.
“Right now, it’s what I need to do,” she said.
He asked, “And you spoke to your mother?”
“Oh yeah, I spoke to her all right,” she quipped, staring off into the distance. Then she gave a little shudder.
“How did it go?” he pressed.
“Not so well, but she just has to live with it.”
“Right. I sure didn’t come here to destroy everything for you. You do know that, right?”
“No, I don’t know that,” she admitted, turning to him, as a chuckle escaped her. “However, I am the one who contacted you about going for coffee.” She shrugged. “So it does feel like I brought this on myself.”
He nodded. “I was planning on calling you when I got here. I haven’t been back to town since, … so it’s been a bit of a decision as to whether I was ever coming back.”
“And honestly, what was there for you to come back for?” she muttered, trying hard not to be bitter about it, but still she sounded hoarse.
“My brother and his wife, which has been nice to see them again. My mother? She doesn’t take to boundaries well, so that may end up with no contact.
Jeremy and Sandy may go that route as well.
Thankfully Mom has Gary, her new beau. Maybe she will go to therapy to deal with my father’s death, and maybe her relationship with Gary will become better and stronger.
” He shrugged at that. “I used to have friends here, but some of that got blown up too. I can let go of those, but definitely I wasn’t happy about some other things going on here.
Some of that I can deal with, and some of that I just can’t. So, it is what it is.”
The coffee stopped dripping at that point. She got up off the floor, poured two cups, and brought them back in, placing them on the coffee tables closest to each of them.
“I’m sorry doesn’t begin to make up for all the shit you had to deal with,” she began, “and yet I don’t have anything else to offer.”
“You don’t need to blow up your whole world because of it. I mean, whatever happened, it happened quite a while ago. From your sister’s point of view, I do understand now why she did it. I mean, your family is nothing if not scary as hell.”
“And yet they never really scared you,” she noted, turning to him.
“I was biding my time,” he said, with a smile.
“Once we were married, we could always move away. I knew that you loved me more than you loved your family, yet I would still try to be a part of the family. I was going to find a way to make it polite and respectful, or else we would just go no-contact or move far away, without sharing our new address with anyone.”
Her heart fluttered at his words.
“But I didn’t know whether or not you were ready to make that choice and to walk away from them,” he shared.
“As I found out back then, you were not.” Her breath came out in a hard gasp, and he added, “I’m not saying that to hurt or to destroy you.
That’s not the point of what I’m trying to get across. ”
She didn’t know what to say, just stared at him, recognizing the truth of what he told her, taking note of all the things he didn’t say.
“I guess we know how that went, and that was part of the problem. I didn’t know as we got closer to getting married if you could withstand the pressure.
So, when you wanted to set a wedding date, I went along with it.
However, I also knew that could potentially end our relationship because, if you wouldn’t stand up to your parents, they would do everything they could to make sure I wasn’t there. ”
His words hit Gail like bullets. She sighed.
“From my perspective today, I can look back and can see how young and how—I don’t know that immature is the right word.
Na?ve might be better. I was just unaware of how the real world worked,” she stated.
“Yet back then, I would have thrown a fit if somebody had told me that.”
He smiled and nodded vehemently. “Yeah, you would have … absolutely. However, you are not the same woman today. I can see that,” he shared.
“It’s clear that you’ve gone through a couple wars over all this.
Nobody should have to go through the pain that we went through,” he stated, “but, when it does happen, it is nice that we matured out of it.”
“Did I?” she questioned, with a hysterical laugh. “Because, God, I didn’t feel very mature when I kicked my mother or my father out of my apartment earlier.”
His lips twitched. “I can’t imagine how they took that.”