Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Evie felt more than a little misunderstood.
All alone in her house, as the months trickled on by, the plants she loved so much began to wither and die in the corner.
What was once a beautiful sun dress was traded for sweatpants.
A stack of bills sprawled across the kitchen table, and the trash hadn’t been taken out in two weeks.
She walked along the edge of where sanity met insanity, and on this cold, deep winter day while the snow outside fell, she felt herself dying with the season.
The screen door wasn’t put on right. And she didn’t care.
He never unfriended her, and occasionally he watched her stories.
But he stopped interacting, and after he viewed more than a dozen well-meaning messages without responding, she stopped watching his stories and engaging with him directly.
Instead, she still tried to support him by leaving good comments on his posts.
On the sofa, her cat kept her company. No one noticed the contrast of what she had become and then what she lost all over again.
Everything was crumbling between wrong and right.
Through her own heart, she heard her own crying.
Another flurry fell outside, and she laid her forehead to her knees that were pulled into her chest.
Around that house, something radiated.
Evie felt like she was walking on a wire in some sideshow circus, not even important enough to be the main attraction.
Night after night, she would carve out his name in her heart, feeling her fists clench as she drove herself to maddening tears.
With clothes all over her floor, the bed didn’t have clean or tidy linens since he turned from her.
It could have only been in her head, but this time it wasn’t.
She rose from the couch to grab wine from the top of the fridge and ignored her never-ending checklists that never were completed. More schedules that weren’t met. But as Evie grabbed the bottle, she looked at it, screamed, then threw it at the wall.
It shattered.
All over, she shook uncontrollably. She had lost time, had lost track of it, and no longer understood it.
She was tired of something.
She was tired of life.
Please, catch me. I’m falling. I can’t do this.
Scribbling maniacally away in a journal full of wishes, checklists, goals and dreams used to comfort her. But now all it was doing was driving her further over the edge.
That damn pesky mania.
The serene memories of falling into his arms came, infecting her mind like vines overtaking her life.
Evie hurried outside and felt like a ghost blending into the winter fog that lingered in her yard.
“I don’t know. I feel like I’m dying. I can’t do this.”
The tears may as well have frozen to her cheeks. “I think I’m close to understanding Jesus.” She gasped through her sobs and held her chest, ignoring the shivering that permeated straight into her bones. Her mumbling was incoherent, and nothing she said would have made sense to anyone but her.
Teddy gave a meow so loudly she could hear it through the closed front window.
She turned and smiled, the tears glittering in her dark eyes that had sweaty hair clinging to them.
She quickly turned back inside and grabbed her keys and left the house in a frenzied hurry, peeling off down her gravel driveway in anger.
Inside back at home, Teddy meowed all alone.
When Evie came home, she flopped on the sofa and ripped open a brown bag and broke open the whiskey bottle and gulped it as hard as she could.
Wine wasn’t going to work. It hadn’t worked in months.
She needed something harder. Her throat burned, and her eyes watered. She stifled her cough and kept going.
Teddy meowed.
She didn’t stop.
Her walls were crumbling all around her, and through the autumn rain, she walked alone. Through the winter frost, she wept in isolation.
Teddy jumped onto her lap and meowed.
She kept drinking. Her eyes closed while the tears rolled down her face, and the whiskey dripped down her neck.
Teddy hissed, launched, and bit her face.
She dropped the bottle, and it spilled all over the newer, expensive sofa.
“Teddy! What the hell was that all about?” She lazily picked up the bottle and placed it on the coffee table after shuffling a bunch of crap to the side.
She then hurried to the kitchen to grab towels, but the alcohol was already taking effect on her.
Her foot hit the coffee table, and she fought to regain her balance, but it was a losing battle.
The images blurred and slanted. Her head buzzed wildly, and her skin sweated profusely. Evie fell face-forward into her entertainment stand. Lying on the floor, she held her forehead and saw a little blood on her fingers.
Teddy hurried over and began licking her injury. Once more, her sobs came. Evie rolled over and hugged her cat like she was going to die if she didn’t. Her face pressed into his fat belly to soothe her headache.
That night, with an icepack to her forehead, Evie sat cross-legged on her sofa with Teddy purring right next to her. She could have gone to the hospital, but she had no choice but to try to be braver. She had no choice but to grow up.
And now she knew exactly what that meant.
She muttered to herself, “I bet he started seeing another girl.” She sniffled. “I can’t believe I was so damn dumb to think someone like me could have ever stood a chance with him.” She wiped her face. “I’m fucked up, but I’ll be okay.”
Wrong. She was simply lying to herself.
She briefly sat upright to twist her back to try to relieve some of that nagging upper back pain. Her chiropractor had chalked it up to just having weak muscles, a weak upper back, and playing guitar hunched over and also being hunched over a laptop for work.
Just like she was going to open her laptop again for work.
She opened her laptop to Facebook and saw that some local businesses had approved of her resume for a few freelance jobs they needed help with and wanted to meet with her in person.
A lighthearted chuckle came to her when she noticed Joey wrote her and said, “I’d like to see what you can do for my winter menu! ”
She drew in a deep breath. Teddy started purring and stretched out with that little ‘mrrp’ sound. He tucked himself into a contorted ball. She petted him and lured out his purrs. They were loud and comforting. She wrote back, “Great! I’ll see you tomorrow!”
On a whim, she checked her story. Caleb had stopped watching her stories over the last month.
He hadn’t seen it.
“Whatever,” she growled under her breath.
“You were watching my stories for a long time, man. Even still, you obviously were interested in me. But, whatever.” She stood up and tossed her laptop on the couch.
“I don’t fucking need you in my life. I got along fine this long without you.
And I’ll do it again.” She twirled around fancifully to walk to her bedroom.
She went to bed with her cat and listened to the sleet and snow patter against the window.
Her foot got caught up in the disarray of the unmade bed, and she kicked the covers up a bit more to pull them over her and Teddy.
She went to sleep, praying to Pawpaw and to Jesus, who she felt she needed now more than ever.
The empty bed felt so empty. Her stomach knotted, and she began to weep. She couldn’t lie to herself. No amount of temporary manic high could alter what she was truly feeling.
She did need him. And she missed him terribly.
Evie rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling.
Control it.
Don’t do it.
Her hands rubbed firmly across her face and her breath quickened.
Breath in, breath out.
Her hands began to tremble. Her throat tightened. Then, her hands slammed down to the bed, and she twisted her sheets with tight fists.
She screamed straight from her very soul and cried loudly. Evie just couldn’t make sense of why so many men had done her wrong so many times in her life. The ugly black horse of depression stamped and raged on her heart.
You never deserved him.
To her salvation, Teddy didn’t flinch. He had grown comfortable around these outbursts. Instead, he just snuggled up by his Evie’s tear-stained face.
That next day, Evie tried to look her best and headed into town to the Songbird Café.
It was nestled right up off the main strip of town called Starling Street.
The street was lined with decaying old Midwest shops that had been around since the town was founded as a railway town in 1867.
Some of the old signs were still painted on the brick sides that flanked decaying alleyways.
Her favorite was the old tobacco sign that took up the whole building with a circular graphic of faded yellow and white.
On the old tobacco building, it was a tradition that graduates of the local high school could take a horseshoe stamp to the building and write their initials with their graduation year on it.
It was a cute homage to the town’s mascot and team name, the Mustangs.
As she pulled into the parallel spot in front of the Songbird Café, she noticed she was parked right next to a police cruiser, an SUV labeled number 710.
She closed her car door and grinned. “Hey there, Hunt.”
Evie entered the slate-painted café, which was a mix of dark gray and metal sheet siding.
The old wooden floors had been refinished to keep their natural distressed and worn look, and overhead through a cased opening there were newspaper articles in picture frames that dated back to the early 1900s to top off the rustic charm and cozy feel.
To her left, the wall was decorated with old findings such as authentic and framed photos from the town’s glory days, an old farm door with chipped paint, and tin signs that offered eggs for a fictional price of twenty-five cents per dozen.