Tilting my head back against the wall, I close my eyes, remembering better times, hoping the memories won’t make me feel so damn lonely.
“Walker’s asleep,” Mandy giggles as she meets me out on our front porch.
“Finally,” I sigh as I walk over to her, scooping her hair up in my hands, pulling her to my body. My lips claim hers as the crickets and frogs sing us a lullaby. She grips my wrists, applying slight pressure so that I allow her to breathe. “Been wanting to do that all day.”
She grins. “I’ve been wanting you to do it all day, too. We need more nights like this,” she whispers.
“Out on the porch?”
“Yeah.” She grabs my hand, getting me to have a seat in the swing with her. “Not in front of our laptops or our phones, not even in front of the TV. We should be asking each other about our days.”
Sometimes that isn’t possible because of shit with the club, but I understand what she’s saying. At the end of the day we have each other, and we don’t spend near enough time together. I don’t ask her about her day often, and she never inquiries about the club, although I would be okay with her doing so. “We should make it a habit.” I put my arm around her neck, to bring her closer.
“We should.” She kisses me softly.
“Promise?” I let my voice drop an octave.
“Promise.” She lets go of my arm and sprawls across me, straddling my waist, wrapping her arms around my neck.
But we hadn’t made it a habit. We’d broken the promise, almost before it even began. Like most everything with the two of us, we did good for a few weeks and then we went back to what was comfortable.
We’ve always allowed other people to be more important than each other in our lives, but that has to stop here. One of us has to make a clear decision, I’m not sure we can come through the other side on another situation like this.
Because this situation? It’s made me realize I’m going to have get very uncomfortable if I want my family back.
And I do - more than anything in this world.
Chapter Five
Mandy
The circle is a little smaller today. Two people who have been in my group since I got here got to go home. Looking down at my engagement and wedding rings, I’m hit with a longing to see Dalton and Walker again. A type of longing I haven’t felt in years.
It could be the new medication they have me on to control my mood swings, or it could be that I’m finally coming out from underneath this dark cloud I’ve been under for so long.
“When was the first time you realized you weren’t like everybody else?”
The leader of our circle asks the question, and I do like I’ve done every day since I got here a week ago - I truly think about it. I close my eyes and settle into the question, giving it a few moments to dig itself into my conscience and then answer it truthfully. When it comes to my turn, I speak slowly.
“The day my mom was served papers saying that they were going to take our house.” I clasp my hands together in front of me. “Things had been rough prior to that. Me and my twin brother, Drew, knew they had been rough, but we’d always known we had a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs.” I stop for a second breathing in deeply and letting it out. “Mom,” I continue, “not wanting us to know, she hid the foreclosure paperwork before she went in for her shift, but Drew and I found it.”
“How did Drew take it?”
We’re in a habit in this group of asking questions to force the person telling the story to see it from each angle.
“Like he always did, he got angry. Pissed that Mom was a single mother and upset that our dad had left her instead of sticking around to raise us. That’s always been his MO - he gets angry. Not angry enough to hurt someone he cares about, but it’s almost as if he holds his anger like a shield.”
“How did you take it?”
I close my eyes, and I’m back to that day, so clearly. “I was scared to death. I can remember running to my room and laying down on the bed, putting the pillow over my head, and screaming. I don’t know why I was screaming, but I screamed until my voice was wrecked. Immediately I began thinking about all the things we’d have to do. There was no way I’d be able to take all the things I loved with me, there was no way we’d even be able to transport our beds in mom’s small car. And that’s when it hit me, right in the stomach…”
I don’t mean to stop, but I need a slight break.
“What hit you?” someone asks.
“All the things I’d missed. I ran down the stairs and threw open the fridge and freezer. There was barely any food, and then I went to the pantry. There were two bags of microwave popcorn and a half loaf of bread. It was like that night my eyes were opened, and since then I haven’t been able to close them.”
“What do you mean?” the group leader asks. “We’re doing really good work here, Mandy, but you need to go just a little bit deeper. Don’t think about it, just say the first thing that pops into your head.”
“It started an obsession with always having and trying to be enough.” I clap my hand over my mouth after the words come out.
“Don’t silence yourself. Keep going.”
I’ve never spoken these feelings aloud before, I’ve never confided them to anyone, and it’s nice to finally not hold my mouth closed after so many years. But at the same time,
