by Adams, S. C.
I gritted my teeth as he walked toward me and dropped down on his knees. He put his hand on my leg and looked up at me like a lost puppy before bowing his head.
“I’m sorry, Abby. All this time, I had all these feelings for you, but I didn’t really know what I wanted. But standing here watching you with our son, cuddling him, I know exactly what I want.”
I lifted my eyebrows.
“Oh yeah? And what’s that?”
He bit his bottom lip and tightened his hand on my leg. His voice wavered as he spoke, and it was hard not to feel emotional myself.
“I want to work it out with you, Abby. I’ve been thinking of you nonstop for the last year, and I want you and Mattie in my life.”
I stared at him for several seconds, trying to contemplate which way to take the conversation. Part of me wanted to collapse into his lap and tell him yes, absolutely. It would make everything so much simpler. But how could I forget everything that had happened? How could I forget what he said today, and his blatant disrespect for his child’s mother? How do I get past the pain?
Staring at him, I sensed that it wasn’t possible, at least not now. And I had to make a decision based on what was best for our son, and not for me. My face stayed hard like a stone and I looked away from Ryder and down at Mattie.
“I want you to leave,” I whispered. “Please go.”
A lump formed in my throat and tears bubbled up in my eyes. But it was better this way. Dr. Rivington was a confused man, and until he got his head on straight, it was better for me and his son to keep our distance.
I felt him release my leg and I lowered my head, hiding the tears that were already trickling down my cheeks. His footsteps moved toward the door and I jumped slightly as he opened it, before closing it behind him.
Then, I was alone, clutching a baby. I looked down at Mattie.
“You and me, okay big guy? Mommy will always be by your side.”
My son cooed and gurgled, but inside, my heart broke all over again because Ryder had come home, and yet I couldn’t let him back into my heart.
27
Abby
The next day I felt like hell, like I had been through a war. I guess, in a way, I had, seeing the massive dust-up with Ryder. It felt useless to sit around the house, moping. As a result, I gathered up Mattie’s things and wandered across the way to my mom’s house, knowing that Belinda would give her grandson all the attention in the world. I wasn’t even sure if I was ready to talk to her about what had happened, to be honest. Hopefully, I could take a deep breath and let things simmer in my mind for a while.
After all, Belinda had been furious when I told her I was pregnant, and that Ryder had left town. She was disappointed in me, sure, because this is exactly what happened to her so long ago. But when she saw me take responsibility, and begin doing whatever I had to do to take care of my son, she relented and began to pitch in. I was thankful. I really needed my mother, and I was glad to have someone on my side.
After all, my mom loves us. I didn’t even realize the extent of her love until I held Matthew in my arms for the first time. My heart was overwhelmed and swelling, and I knew for the first time, what it was like to be a parent. This kind of love is unconditional, and I knew that I would do anything for my boy.
As a result, I wanted my mom to know how much I appreciated her and all the sacrifices she made to raise Melody and me as a single mom. It couldn’t have been easy, and now that I’m a single mom myself, it only made her love and generosity more apparent.
As I strode across the driveway, I realized that my mom’s car wasn’t there. Hmm. I hadn’t even thought about calling to see if she was going to be home. But then again, Belinda was probably at work, still trying to save up enough money so that Melody could go to any college she wanted to. My mom had offered to give me some money for the baby, but I told her to give it to my sister. My sister would feel resentful if she saw me and the baby getting extra, so it was better to be excruciatingly fair.
I went into the house anyways, and found Melody sitting in the kitchen. Mattie was sound asleep in his carrier so I set it down on the floor and covered him up with a blanket. Melody barely looked at me when I walked in, but she leaned and stared at my son sleeping.
“He’s cute,” she managed in a grudging voice. At least my sister loved the baby. After all, I made a huge deal out of her being an aunt, trying to make my sister feel special when all the focus was on me and my pregnancy. I could tell Melody liked having the title, and I was pretty sure that that alone was what changed her mind about the baby. Yet, she never held him. The only time I could remember her taking him into her arms was in the hospital when he was a newborn.
I didn’t let it bother me though, because Melody has changed a lot in the past year. Somehow, she’s lost a lot of weight, which is good in some respects. It’s just scary to see her subsisting on diet shakes and bananas. Plus, she continued to lose weight to the point where she was looking extremely thin. When she wore a crop top, I could see her ribs poking out. She looked strung out like an emaciated Barbie doll. Of course, I knew better than to tell Melody my thoughts. With me being thirty pounds heavier than before, she would just say I was jealous.
Yet with her weight loss came a lot of other changes too. For some reason, she bleached her hair platinum blonde and started dressing sexy. Personally, I thought her hair look absolutely awful. She bleached it herself, and it had burned her hair to the texture of straw. It looked almost like she was wearing a really cheap wig, but I didn’t tell her that, because she seemed to absolutely love it. Plus, I knew that my opinion didn’t matter to her in the least. She would have told me that I was jealous, which absolutely was not the case.
There wasn’t a single thing about my sister that I was jealous about. Melody had no aspirations, no hopes for her future, and no motivation. Even though I had no idea what her dating life was like, I suspected she was attracting the wrong type of guy with her new look and crass attitude. Of course, I said nothing about this. After all, Melody would just turn on me.
I walked over to the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge. “When’s Mom getting home?”
My sister sighed.
“Hell if I know. Why don’t you call her and ask?”
I held my tongue over her negative attitude. Over the last year our relationship, which obviously had never been great, deteriorated even more. Melody had never been very supportive of my pregnancy, and at one point actually gloated about the fact that I was going to become a single mother.
She thought she was so much better than me, but that wasn’t even what bothered me the most. What bothered me was the fact that she only felt good about herself by putting other people down. Who does that? Nor was I the only victim, I was merely the most convenient one. Melody knew I didn’t like confrontation, and she knew I didn’t want to put stress on our mother, so she knew she could pretty much say whatever she wanted without me returning fire. She was one of the most pathetic people I had ever met, and the fact that she was my sister was becoming less and less relevant as the days went on.
But I held my tongue again. I looked at her outfit, which consisted of a pair of leather short shorts, and a top held up in the back by just a single string. Her straw like blonde hair was flipped to the side and she wore very heavy makeup.
“Are you going out?” I asked in a civil tone.
She didn’t look up at me. “Yeah, I can’t just sit around here all the time.”
“What about Derek?” I asked.
After all, Melody was now going out with Derek McHutt, the very guy she said had been obsessing over me forever. I wasn’t interested, seeing that I had just been pregnant and given birth to a baby. The last thing I wanted was a relationship with a man.
“Please, I only dated him for a few weeks.” She snickered at the thought. “I had to dump him and fast. He was so lame. Besides, I have much bigger fish to fry and I don’t want to be tied down.”
I
lifted both eyebrows, just staring as she talked. It seems that after she dumped Derek, she became quite the wild child. Evidently, she went out constantly, and usually with a different guy every night. Moreover, Melody even got a job working as a bartender at a strip club. What happened to regular jobs like being a cashier or working at a call center?
“Yeah, I make great tips,” she bragged.
I swallowed hard.
“Melody, that place is a dump. The customers are idiots, and your co-workers are strippers. Nothing wrong with that, but can’t you be a bartender at a regular place?”
My sister shot me a disgusted look.
“The tips are better because it’s a strip club, and please, stop acting like a prude. It’s like you’re eighty years old, Abby. Just because you have a baby now doesn’t mean that you have to act like you’re so high and mighty.”
I held my tongue once more, knowing that words were useless. Melody figured that because she wasn’t stripping, her job was okay. She was just pouring drinks, albeit doing it in a bikini and five-inch heels. Of course, guys gawked at her and groped her every time she came around the bar, but then again, I was pretty sure she liked the attention.
Melody looked back down at Mattie as he yawned. She smiled at him and then glanced up at me.
“Mattie’s really cute. He must take after his father.”
I pulled up a chair and sat down. “Thanks. Babies’ facial features are indeterminate, so he might look completely different later on in life.”
She snickered, clicking her pen. “Yeah well let’s hope he takes after his dad.”
I rolled my eyes, trying to not respond to her dig. Besides, clearly Melody had no maternal instincts at all. Watching her pull a clean diaper from the box and hold it with two fingers at arm’s length was enough to tell me that she should probably never have children. The unfortunate part was, if she didn’t grow up, she would most likely end up with several.
My sister took a deep breath and shrugged her shoulders.
“I mean I guess it’s better for you than me. You’ve never been the kind of girl that cared much about her future. I have things to do in my life and I can’t imagine being saddled with a baby.”
I smiled frigidly.
“You know, you should probably not make comments about things that you have no idea about. Until you’ve walked in my shoes. Until you’ve held that positive pregnancy test in your fingers. Until you’ve had a relationship that actually meant something, you should keep your opinions to yourself. Because I’m going to tell you right now, no one is going to care what you think. You have no experience when it comes to this kind of thing. You have no idea what kind of love there is between a mother and a child. You can’t even appreciate the fact that our own mother loves you.”
Melody’s jaw clenched and she narrowed her eyes at me. She stared at me with hatred for several moments. I could tell I’d really gotten to her. It wasn’t very often that I stood up to her, but I was tired of her dissing me with every chance that she got. I get it. I made a mistake. But now I had this beautiful baby, which I didn’t regret in the least, and I was tired of hearing it out of her mouth every five seconds. She needed to come up with a new routine.
But then Melody turned away, completely disinterested, and I grew frustrated again. Clearly, my sister just didn’t care. She had no emotional feelings toward me, and every time it happened, I swore I would not let it bother me. But every time it happened, it did hurt and stabbed me to my core.
I closed my eyes for a moment and decided to move forward, trying to make conversation with her. After all, we were sisters, and one day I hoped that she would see that our relationship was important.
“So, Ryder Rivington is back in town. He’s filling in for Dr. McNamara while she’s on vacation.”
Melody’s mouth twisted into a smirk. She looked at me and batted her eyelashes.
“Really? That guy was hot! Maybe I’ll get an appointment and we’ll go out on a date. I bet he looks really good without his clothes on. I heard he’s always looking for someone easy because that’s the kind of guy he is. No matter. I’m the kind of girl he’ll come back to Farmington for. Then again, he might not come back just to avoid other people.”
My nostrils flared and it took me a moment to really let what she had just said sink into my brain. Then I had to question myself. Did my little sister really just say that? Did she just hint that she wanted to date the father of my child, while making a dig at me?
Yep. She absolutely did.
28
Abby
It felt like my brain just completely stopped. Melody had done a lot of things to me our entire lives. She has said a lot of hurtful things, and she’s done a lot of hurtful things too, but what she just said was completely beyond the pale. At first, I couldn’t even compute. All I could do was sit there with my mouth wide open. I didn’t even recognize the girl that my sister had become. After a few moments of just staring at her smug face, I finally gathered my thoughts.
“What?” I asked standing up. “What kind of monster are you? That is the father of my child. Have you really become such a pathetic and insignificant person that you would have to stoop so low to make yourself feel better?”
She tried to talk but I put my hand up, tired of her nastiness. “I don’t know where you got this attitude from, but I can promise you that no one finds it attractive. And these guys, all they’re doing is trying to get one thing out of you because they know you’ll give it up. Melody, how could you even consider going out on a date with Ryder? You know who he is to me, and you know what he did to me and your nephew. Don’t you want what’s best for Mattie? I really feel like you’ve lost your mind.”
Nothing seemed to faze Melody. She didn’t give a crap about the fact that she had just hurt me because all she cared about was herself. And of course, she had to be nasty about it.
“No one wants you anymore, Abby, least of all Ryder. Let him go. I know you’re hung up on him, but please. You’re just history at this point.”
My mouth opened but words wouldn’t come out. Melody continued.
“I might as well date him,” she said with a shrug. “If not me, then who? Plus, didn’t you say he took you on some luxurious vacation last time? Maybe this time he’ll do the same with me. Not to mention that he’s rolling in dough, and maybe he’ll buy me some fancy clothes and jewelry. I have that kind of effect on men, you know. When they’re around me, all they want to do is spoil me because they know I’m worth it.”
I blinked several times staring at her, wondering if she was ever going to shut up. Finally, I collected my thoughts.
“And what exactly makes you think that? Because they tell you how fabulous you are? Have you ever thought that maybe it’s because they’re just trying to get in your pants? I mean, I don’t know why they would go to all the trouble to tell you those things. It’s not like you won’t give it up anyway.”
Melody laughed right in my face.
“Look, just because you fucked-up and are now a single mother doesn’t mean the rest of us are going to make the same mistakes you made. It also doesn’t make the rest of us whores like you. So if you wouldn’t mind, stop projecting your insecurities on me. There are actual women out there who have a modicum of self-respect. You probably should’ve thought about that before you went spreading your legs for just anyone. It’s not like I didn’t try to warn you about him. The difference is, I know what he’s after, and I know what I can get from him.”
I was completely astonished. I had no idea that my sister had this calculating, mercenary streak in her. I had no idea that this kind of malice lurked within. Not only did she have zero self-respect, but she had no respect for me as her sister. She was a hateful little thing, and I wondered how we were even related. My mother never raised us to be like this.
Gripping the back of the chair, I looked down and realized that I was shaking. This time, it was warranted. I was trying desperately to figure out what to say
back to my sister. I could be nasty, and I could continue to put her down, but that would do nothing but fuel her fire. Melody was immune to my barbs, and it would probably only cause her to attack even more viciously.
I opened up a bottle of water and took a sip, trying to calm my nerves. Between the conversation with Ryder the night before and now this, I was starting to think I was losing my mind. In fact, it felt like the whole world was losing its mind.
Suddenly, my thoughts stopped in their tracks. Ryder said he sent a letter to the address listed in my medical records, but I only moved into my apartment a year ago. Before that, I was living here with my mom. It’s not a big deal because we live in the same complex, but still. Did the letter come here, and not to my apartment?
My eyes flickered up to Melody, who was lazily scrolling through her phone. That was when the realization hit me. Oh god, no. Please don’t let it be true, but the roiling in my gut told me otherwise.
Could my sister have hidden Ryder’s letter from me?
I thought about it carefully and then decided that I needed to know the answer.
“Melody, have you ever, in the last year, received a letter to this house written by Ryder and addressed to me?”
I watched my sister very carefully to see if she’d lie. After all, it’s a habit of hers, formed when she was a small child. She couldn’t help herself. When she was little she lied about small things, but as she got older her lies grew bigger. It wasn’t until she reached her late teens that she realized lies needed to be believable. But still, anytime she lied, I knew it. As her sister, I could always tell.
Her finger stopped momentarily on the phone but she didn’t look up. She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.
“No. I’m the one who checks the mail every day, but I don’t recall ever seeing anything like that. I’m pretty sure we would have seen it. God knows you were desperately trying to find him, even though it was very obvious he wanted nothing to do with you. That man ghosted your ass, and I find it hilarious.”
