Chapter 5
Melanie
A relentless, pounding beat brought me out of a deep sleep Sunday morning.
I moaned and jerked my head to the side when I opened my eyes and the sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window almost blinded me.
The movement caused a twinge of pain to streak through my temples, making me moan again.
It took longer than it should have for me to realize that the pounding beat I was hearing was the throbbing of my own pulse ricocheting through my brain.
“Fucking ouzo,” I whimpered, then grimaced as the foul taste in my mouth registered.
After closing my eyes and laying completely still for a few minutes, my screaming bladder was making it clear that I needed to get up whether I wanted to or not.
I eased out of bed and carefully made my way into the bathroom, not an easy task since the room was swaying rather alarmingly.
Not bothering to turn on the light as I took care of business, I shuffled over to the sink to wash my hands and brush my teeth.
Since I hadn’t taken the time to close the blinds last night, there was plenty of light shining in from the bedroom for me to see that I looked like something that had just been dragged ass-first out of a crypt in a low-budget horror movie.
“Fucking ouzo,” I whimpered again, then chastised myself for getting into this state. “At the ripe old age of forty-one now, you’d think you would know better, Melanie Jane.”
I forced myself to shower, hoping it would make me feel like something approaching a human again. Luckily, it did help, as did the Tylenol I took and the three cups of coffee I drank, along with eating a bagel to soak up any residual booze lingering in my system.
After lazing around on the couch for an hour or so just letting the medicine and the caffeine do their thing, I finally felt as if I would live to see another day.
My first order of business was to pour the last of the ouzo down the drain and chuck the bottle in the trash, along with the leftover food that I’d been too drunk to remember to stick in the refrigerator last night.
It was just as well, since the idea of anything Greek made my stomach turn right this very moment.
On second thought, maybe that was the unpleasant aroma of spoiled lamb and tzatziki that caused my insides to heave as I tossed the carryout containers into the trash.
I washed my coffee mug and plate, then glanced out the kitchen window to see that we had indeed received a few inches of snow overnight.
Sighing, I bundled up in my boots, coat, gloves, scarf, and hat, then grabbed the trash bag from the kitchen and took it outside to put in the garbage bin so that the smell wouldn’t linger in the kitchen.
The bin needed to be wheeled to the curb for trash pickup tomorrow morning, and unfortunately, that meant clearing the snow.
I didn’t feel up to shoveling the entire driveway, but I did manage to remove the snow from the front porch and walkway and was working on a path along the side of the drive when I heard a voice calling out from the house next door.
“Your husband lucked out, didn’t he? He gets a weekend in sunny Las Vegas, and we get to freeze our asses off shoveling snow.”
I turned and placed the shovel upright, leaning on the handle as I looked over at Justin, our fairly new neighbor. He walked over carrying his own shovel, then motioned me aside.
“Let me finish this for you, and I’ll put the garbage bin out when I’m done,” he offered kindly, and I smiled at him gratefully.
“Normally I’d at least put up a token argument to be polite, but I don’t have the energy to bother,” I admitted with a wry grin, then moved aside as he started to shovel where I had stopped.
He chuckled, and then what he’d first said registered, and I stiffened slightly.
“How did you know Ryan was in Vegas?”
Justin glanced over his shoulder at me as he tossed a shovel full of snow off to the side of the driveway. “He sent me some pictures yesterday from the golf tournament. Can you believe he was standing just a few feet from Landon Brown?”
The name was vaguely familiar, but Justin must have seen my confusion. “Landon Brown…the guy who holds the NBA’s free throw record,” he prompted.
“Oh, a basketball player,” I said. My tone must have conveyed that I was monumentally unimpressed, because Justin scoffed.
“Not just a basketball player, one of the best basketball players of all time. The man’s a hoops legend, and Ryan just had to rub it in that he was right there next to him, the lucky fucker. When does he get back?”
“Late tonight.” My reply was automatic, my mind already spiraling because Ryan had taken the time to text with our neighbor who’d moved in less than five months ago yet hadn’t found even five seconds to check in with me, the woman he’d been married to for twelve damned years.
Tears stung the back of my eyes, and I blinked rapidly trying to banish them before they fell.
“I’m going –“ My voice cracked and I stopped to swallow in an attempt to ease the tightness in my throat, “I’m going to head back inside, if you don’t mind,” I managed to say. “This frigid air is making my eyes water. Thanks again for finishing up for me. I really do appreciate it.”
“No problem. It’s the least I could do after you made that zucchini bread for us last week. That stuff was killer. Sasha would love to get the recipe, by the way.”
“I’ll text it to her.”
He nodded, then turned back to scoop up another shovel full of snow.
I barely fought the urge to slam my front door as I hurried inside, ripping my scarf from around my neck and tossing it over the arm of the couch, then flinging my gloves and hat across the room.
They hit the wall and then fell to the floor too softly to provide much satisfaction.
The zipper caught on my coat as I yanked it down, causing me to curse out loud, rather than in my head as I had been.
“Motherfucking son of a bitch,” I snarled, wrenching the zipper free, pulling off my coat and letting it drop to the floor before removing my wet boots and carrying them into the laundry room in the back of the house where I kept a mat for such things to dry on.
I paced around the kitchen for a few minutes, muttering under my breath and resisting the need to throw something that would do some actual damage, like a plate to the wall.
Only the thought that I would be the one to clean up the broken pottery and repair the hole in the wall prevented me from following through.
I wanted to hit something – or maybe someone – for probably the first time since I’d divorced my cheating bastard of an ex-husband.
My hair was a wild mess of waves after removing my hat, and when I reached up to brush it back from my face, my fingertips came away wet with tears I didn’t even realize I had shed.
That knowledge was enough to bring me back to earth. “Breathe,” I instructed myself. “Big breath in…and exhale.”
I repeated the process several times as the rage that had consumed my mind and body started to ebb, leaving me feeling drained and almost lifeless inside.
I walked back into the living room, methodically picking up the hat and gloves from the floor, then putting everything away in its place in the front entry closet.
I smoothed my hands down the front of my sweater as I surveyed the room which now looked as it always did.
Cozy and warm. Lived in and welcoming. It was home. It was us.
My house wasn’t a carefully curated designer showplace.
I saved that for our clients at work. My house was our home and every single thing in this room held memories of our family, from the oak coffee table that I had found at a flea market and convinced Ryan to haul home for me to refinish – it had turned out to be a beautiful piece, thank you very much – to the lamp that Ryan had glued back together after a rogue basketball knocked it over during a sleepover the boys had when they were thirteen, to the antique, upright grand piano that none of us could play but we kept anyway because it had belonged to Ryan’s late grandmother.
There were photos everywhere, on top of the piano, lining the fireplace mantle, and on nearly every wall in the room.
Smiling faces and happy moments frozen in time, providing a stark reminder on days like today that our lives had changed over the past two years, and not for the better.
Proof of that was in the photos themselves.
Every single photo on display was at least two years old.
I sank down into my favorite chair in the corner of the room and pulled out my phone, then navigated to my photo app, needing to see with my own eyes the proof that our family dynamic had shifted, and that it wasn’t just my imagination.
In the album marked “Family Fun”, I had captured hundreds of pictures and videos of all of us from the summer before the boys’ sophomore year, as we taught them to drive and went camping in Michigan.
There were hundreds more of us the summer before their junior year when we spent a week on vacation in San Francisco.
In many of them, Ryan was front and center with the boys, and in several, one of the boys had used my phone to take pictures of Ryan and me together.
I continued on through the photos, smiling sadly at the sight of our two handsome sons posing with their dates for their senior prom in April.
It was followed by a photo of me flanked by the two of them in their tuxes.
One of the girls had snapped the picture for me since Ryan hadn’t been home.
He’d been at a basketball game with Mitch that night.
I remembered how irritated I’d been that he’d chosen to miss such an important night in the boys’ lives, for a stupid ball game.