I would do it. As much as I could alone, but with help.
Without Lance.
Two Months Later
A lot could happen in two months.
Especially when every day felt like a year. Every moment like a week.
Especially when you spent every moment expecting a phone call. An explanation. Expected a knock on the door. A large figure to be waiting outside your place of work. Your son’s school.
When you woke up in the middle of the night reaching for someone who wasn’t there. Someone who had only been there for a week. It didn’t build up the right, the reason to have a reaction this big and dramatic to a man leaving me. I wasn’t a dramatic person. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But it was safe to say my reaction to Lance leaving me with an explanation that was thinner than my heart right now.
Nathan’s was just as bad. He was confused. He was hurt. He was a sensitive being, so he saw my hurt, despite how hard I tried to hide it. So that made it all worse. When I told him I didn’t know when, or if Lance was coming back, he didn’t cry. Which was bad. Which was agony. Because he wanted to cry, I could see the wobble in his lip, the glassiness to his beautiful eyes. But he fought it. Fought it hard enough for his little hands to ball into fists and his entire body to turn stiff.
I wanted to hate Lance right then. To figure out a way to contact him, to see him so I could punch him right in the mouth for making my little boy have that reaction. But even with all of my mother’s fury, I couldn’t hate Lance.
I knew why he wasn’t crying. Because he was trying to be strong for me. He was trying to be like Lance, his hero, the man he looked up to, and the man he’d told me, not two days before, that he wanted to be when he grew up. Of course he’d made me promise not to tell the man himself that, because he wanted to keep his cool, and that had further filled me with warmth.
Now it was pure ice. Shards of my broken heart.
I’d done my best to make this new rental look like ours. Few of our possessions had survived the fire, something that should have absolutely devastated me, considering everything they represented, but I felt strong enough to deal with it. Especially with Lance by my side. Or I’d tricked myself into thinking he was.
Rosie had single-handedly not just restocked my closet but managed to make it bigger than it had ever been in the past. And because she was Rosie, she did it without me being able to stop her. The first night in the house was just her getting warmed up.
Everything that she brought over was me. Was a style that I hadn’t even realized I had. A style I hadn’t been able to afford to have. Hippy but a little bit trashy. I was still a trailer park girl, after all. I’d hated all the beige that Robert had made me wear. The tailoring of it all. No skin was shown. He “didn’t want everyone thinking his wife was a slut.”
I didn’t want anyone thinking that either. I also didn’t want a beating for arguing with him. So I’d worn it. It covered the bruises well at least.
Now I had no bruises to cover and autonomy over my own wardrobe and my life, I hadn’t exactly utilized it, because I was mainly in my work uniform and didn’t have time or resources to go shopping. I’d usually snatch a couple of things at Walmart while getting things for Nathan. Karen and I would hit the vintage stores.
My previous closet might’ve hinted at that, but Rosie was some kind of magician to somehow see that. She was my very own fairy godmother by the looks of the small closet in the master. Nor would she hear a word about me paying her back. And for once, I didn’t argue. I just thanked her and then humored her demands by doing a ‘fashion show’ for her, Eliza, Karen, Polly, and Nathan with every single new thing I now owned. It took over an hour. And over two bottles of wine. Uncontrollable laughter.
In a house that was within viewing distance of the blackened remains of our home. In a time where I was being protected by a man who’d made it clear he wasn’t going to leave Nathan and I alone. In the midst of another man leaving Nathan and I alone when that was the last thing either of us wanted.
It was a gift bigger than some kick-ass clothes—and shoes, purses, and jewelry—it was priceless.
I told Rosie as much, near tears and maybe the tiniest bit drunk.