Broken Love Story

by Natasha Madison

  My phone beeps on my chest, and picking it up, I see it’s a picture from Samantha of her hand holding a taco with the caption.

  Queen of the badass.

  I laugh at her, thinking it’s one small step for her, but I know it’s a huge one.

  I send her back a reply.

  Lock the doors, there is a badass on the loose!

  She sends me back a simple:

  hahaha

  I put the phone down as I continue watching the movie, but my mind isn’t on the movie; it’s on a table some two hours from me where three girls try to fix their broken hearts. She doesn’t call me that night or the night after.

  On my first shift back, I sit on my bunk, wondering if I should call her. I don’t think any more because my fingers have already dialed. She answers after one ring.

  “Hey,” she says, and I smile, listening to her voice.

  “Hey, yourself. Did the taco police take you hostage?” I ask with a smile on my face, and she laughs softly.

  “Very funny,” she says, and I hear rustling.

  “Were you in bed?” I look back at my watch, seeing it’s nine.

  “I was,” she says quietly. “I took another step yesterday.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I ask, my interest piqued.

  “I called Elliot and Ethan and asked them if they wanted any of Eric’s clothes.” I think I stop breathing, listening to her. “Needless to say, it didn’t go over well.”

  “What do you mean?” I sit up in my bed, my blood starting to boil. That whole fucking family needs to be knocked on their asses.

  “Well, there were lots of questions, and then some guilt about erasing him from our lives,” she says as she sniffles again. “How the fuck am I erasing him from our lives when I have his two children?” she asks, and I don’t think I’ve ever hated someone more in my life. “Like I don’t get it.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” I’m not sure why I ask that question. I’m not even sure we qualify as friends.

  “Because I thought you’ve heard me bitch enough over the past couple of days.”

  “Oh, please.” I roll my eyes. “Asking me questions and discussing tacos isn’t bitching.”

  “Tomorrow, I’m painting the house,” she says cheerfully.

  “Are you?” I ask, wondering if her brothers-in-law will help her.

  “I am. The girls and I discussed it, and we are going to do one room at a time,” she tells me, finally a pep in her voice. “We are starting with the kitchen. I wanted a soft yellow; is that a weird color?”

  “Soft yellow?” I ask.

  “Yes, I was researching on Pinterest, and it’s so pretty and uplifting, the color like the soft sun. Besides, no one frowns when they see yellow. It makes you smile.”

  “Does it?” I tilt my head, smiling. “Was that on Pinterest also?”

  “No, that was on Google when I searched for the most cheerful color.” She laughs, and I shake my head with a chuckle. “I’m not kidding.”

  “I would never doubt a woman and Google,” I tell her. “Ever.”

  “Did Eric do things around the house?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I answer. “But in his defense, Hailey always started it when he was gone, and he would finish it for her.”

  She pffts. “Meanwhile, for him to cut the grass, I had to cheer him on.” Her voice isn’t sad this time; it’s kind of the opposite.

  “Okay, so yellow kitchen and then what?”

  “No idea,” she answers. “One room at a time.”

  I shake my head. “You really are a badass.”

  She laughs now, a full belly laugh. “It feels good,” she says, “being a badass. Or maybe it’s you.”

  “Me?” I ask her, but she can’t answer because the siren sounds. “Gotta go.” I disconnect, getting myself downstairs while I get into gear. It’s only four hours later when I check my phone and see she sent me a message as soon as the call came in.

  be safe.

  I look at the clock and see it’s way past one a.m. I’m afraid to wake her up, so I make a note to message her tomorrow. I fall asleep, dreaming of nothing but yellow—yellow sun, yellow sand, and blond yellow hair.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Samantha

  I wake and check my phone to see if he texted me back while I kiss the girls good morning and head downstairs to start breakfast and make coffee.

  I yell for the girls, and we rush out, catching the bus without a second to spare. When I get back home, I get in my car and hit up Home Depot. I go straight for the paint department, choosing a soft, soft yellow. I pick up everything I need in order to make it happen. I walk to the car with a smile, unloading the car in four trips. I’m finally moving things out of the room when the doorbell rings. I walk to it, seeing it’s Judy.

  “Hey,” I say, opening the door. “Come in.”

  She comes in, smiling, and follows me to the kitchen. “Sorry, I can’t offer you anything. I’m about to start painting.”

  She gasps out in shock as she looks around and sees the mess of the room, the yellow paint poured in the pan in the middle of the room. “What are you doing?” she asks, looking at me.

  “I’m painting the room,” I tell her, thinking it’s pretty obvious as to what I’m doing. “It’s been a long time, and it hasn’t been painted, so why not?”

  “Well, Eric painted this room two years ago,” she says, wringing her hands. “It’s just …”

  “I’ve been asking him to paint this room for a year, and he never did it,” I tell her, picking up the roller. I roll it in the paint and then try it on the wall to see how the color looks. “Isn’t it pretty?” I smile, turning to her and seeing her scowl.

  “No, actually, it’s not.” She folds her arms across her chest. “It’s ridiculous.”

  I shrug my shoulders, not letting her get to me, but the tears start coming as I blink them away, or at least try. “I like it.”

  “This whole thing has gone on long enough,” she says, her words coming out in almost a yell. “Ever since Eric died, you’ve changed. It’s like you aren’t even that person anymore,” she spits out, and I turn around, looking at her.

  “I think you seem to be mistaken on that.” I look at her, my heart pounding and almost breaking when I see the look she is giving me, the look like I’m an afterthought, the look she’d give a stranger. “You see, when Eric died, my entire life came out as a lie.” I blink, and the tears still fall. “Everything that we had for the past twelve years has been playing in my mind.”

  “He made a mistake!” she shouts.

  “A mistake?” I laugh and cry at the same time. “A mistake is he chose the wrong shirt to put on, or he picked up Coke instead of Diet Coke.” She glares at me. “Marrying another woman wasn’t a mistake. Living with her for eighteen months wasn’t a mistake. Painting her house and fixing up her house wasn’t a mistake. It was a choice. A choice he made because he was selfish.”

  “How do you know he did all that?” she asks, and I just shrug.

  “I’m assuming since he didn’t do them here, he must be doing it somewhere.”

  “Well, that’s the problem; you’re assuming instead of knowing.”

  I shake my head. “Well, he slept with her, he had sex with her, and he promised to love her forever. Am I to assume he didn’t mean that?”

  “Maybe if you had stopped harassing him when he was home and had been more understanding, it wouldn’t have led to that.” And I’m gutted; I’m so fucking gutted I don’t even think I can breathe. Her hand flies up. “Maybe if you had been there for him and caring to his needs, he wouldn’t have gone elsewhere.”

  I step back. My chest is heaving, rising up and down as if I ran a marathon. It’s almost broken; my heart is broken as I look at this woman standing in front of me who pretended to love me. “So Eric doing what he did was all my fault?” I ask her, and she doesn’t answer. “No!” I yell now. “It wasn’t my fucking fault that I was a single parent for the past eigh
teen months while he was off gallivanting and making himself another family. Without you guys, might I add.” I rub the tears off my face angrily. “It’s not my fault that he felt the need to lead two fucking lives. That’s on him.” I shake my head. “Now I’m here by myself raising two girls, trying to make it look like we can live without him. I’m trying to give them the normal that they need, that they deserve. That I finally deserve.”

  “You were nothing before Eric.” And it’s at that moment I know she never loved me; she never cared for me. She never felt I was a part of her family.

  I smile at her as I cry and break inside. “Wow, boy, was I stupid. Here I thought when you said I was just part of the family that you actually meant it, that you meant you loved me no matter what. That it didn’t matter what happened before because now I had you guys. You were right about one thing; I was nothing before him, but I’m something now. I’m a mother now. They are my life; they are my family. They are mine.”

  “We’ll see about that,” she says, and she storms out of the house, slamming the door behind her.

  I look at the paint, and nothing comes in me, not one piece of happiness is in me while I look at the paint. I take my phone out and send Blake a text.

  I might be rethinking painting the room yellow.

  I don’t know why I sent him a text. I don’t even know why I’m sad he doesn’t get right back to me, but I look back at the wall and see the yellow. It’s a change, and it’s my house. I look at the mess of the kitchen, turn around, and take a deep breath. Dipping the brush into the paint again, I continue to paint. The more I paint, the more I feel a little happier. Until the phone rings and when I walk over with a smile, it immediately disappears when I see that it’s Elliot.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “What the fuck did you do to Mom?” he asks right away, anger in his voice.

  “I didn’t do anything to your mother,” I tell him.

  “She just called me, and she is hysterical,” he hisses.

  “She came to see me and saw that I’m painting the kitchen. According to her, it’s my fault that Eric cheated and married someone in secret,” I say, putting the brush back into the paint.

  “I doubt she said that,” he says.

  “Of course, you do, because according to your mother, I was nothing before Eric, so I mean, I can’t expect anyone to believe me or actually be on my side.”

  “Sam,” he says quietly now. “She’s going through a lot.”

  “Really, you don’t say?” I laugh. “I mean, it’s not like I lost my husband, and then my girls lost their father, and I lost the only family that I’ve ever known. I’m sure she is going through a shit ton.”

  “I just think you should relax when you talk to her.”

  “How’s this? I won’t talk to any of you since every single time I try to tell you guys how I feel, you just feel the need to let me know how perfect Eric was,” I say, finally sounding defeated as I just hang up on him.

  I sit in the middle of the kitchen now, my legs crossed, looking around and seeing my little piece of happiness. I sit here, thinking about how the last time we painted the kitchen, he bitched the whole time—his shoulder hurt, he hated the color, he was tired. And I walked around on eggshells, trying not to piss him off. I had to take the kids to the park just so he could have peace and quiet.

  My phone rings again, and this time, it’s Blake.

  “Hey,” I say, smiling.

  “Sorry I didn’t text you back. I had to save a cat.”

  I throw my head back and laugh. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the fucking cat went into this tree and wouldn’t fucking come down, and then when I finally got to the fucker, he hissed at me and bit me.” I can’t stop laughing while I picture him in a tree chasing a cat. “Luckily, I had my gloves on, but yeah, so why isn’t yellow a good idea anymore?”

  “My mother-in-law came in when I had just started painting.”

  “Oh, fuck,” he says. It’s funny how he’s never really met me, and he doesn’t know any of us, but he knows it’s bad.

  “Yeah, well, it went downhill,” I say softly. “I think what hurt the most was when she said I was nothing without Eric.”

  Blake hisses, but I continue, “I grew up a child of the state, so I’m used to all the names. But I figure in twelve years, I loved your son and had his children, which are your grandchildren. I think I’m someone.”

  “You’re more that someone,” he tells me. “To those girls, you are the world. You’re showing them that you live even when it’s hard. You’re showing Lizzie that you can be sad and then dust yourself off and survive.”

  “You think so?” I ask him. “Do you know I don’t even know what Eric’s least favorite color was.”

  “Green,” he says right away. “He fucking hated green.”

  “Fuck,” I say and laugh. “I wanted to paint my bedroom his least favorite color, but green …?”

  He laughs now. “Yeah, I don’t know about that.”

  I look at the clock. “Shit, I gotta get the girls,” I tell him. “I’ll call you later.” I disconnect and run to the bus stop, getting there at the same time as the bus pulls up. The girls and I walk back to the house, and I know right away I made the right choice because my girls love the new kitchen.

  So all the doubts are gone when I get to see the smile on Lizzie’s face as she does a circle in the room and her eyes light up. Totally worth it, I decide as I smile to myself and not once do I think about Eric.

  We end up making grilled cheese for dinner while I finish painting, and when it’s finally done and everything is put back into place, I take a picture and send it to Blake with the title, My Sunshine.

  I put my phone away and smile as I fold my arms across my chest and take in what I just did, and by myself, no less. I smile the whole time I walk upstairs and take a shower and then smile even bigger when I see that Blake has sent me fifteen Pinterest ideas for a green room.

  I call him as I get into bed. “I think you should go with mint,” he says softly when he answers.

  I laugh. “Well, if I have to pick between the moss green and the mint, I would pick the mint.”

  We talk about our days, and I tell him how happy the girls were when they came home. “See, you hang the moon to those two.”

  “If you could change one thing in your life, what would it be?” I ask him when we both yawn.

  “That we found Frankie’s cancer earlier,” he says without skipping a beat. “What about you?”

  “That I found out about Eric before he died,” I say softly, and we are saved by the bell when he leaves for a call and disconnects.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Blake

  “I can’t believe we sold everything,” Hailey says to me as she puts her bag in the front seat of her car, and I follow with her two suitcases, putting them into the trunk. In the past week, she has donated Eric’s clothes to the homeless shelter, sold her house, and had that yard sale where she sold everything except Eric’s tools. She gave those to me under protest—I didn’t want them—but then I thought about who I would give them to, and I knew that it would be only right to give them to Samantha. If she didn’t want them, she could give them to the girls.

  Samantha, who like Hailey, is trying to purge Eric from her system, has single-handedly repainted her whole house. After her kitchen, she painted her living room. That conversation still makes me laugh.

  “I’m moving on to the living room, and I think I’m going to take the picture of us down,” she said late one night, later than usual since I was out on a call.

  “Did you talk to the girls about it?” I asked her as I lay in bed thinking about her in her own.

  “Not yet,” she answered with a yawn. “I’m going to take it down to paint, and we can talk then.”

  “What color did you choose?”

  “Well, according to Google …” She laughed as I closed my eyes and silently laughed. “Muted blue is the cozi
est color.”

  “So yellow kitchen, blue living room. Mint green bedroom.”

  “It sounds like a Skittles commercial,” she said laughing, something that she did more and more. I smiled at her, and then she hit me with another one of her questions.

  “If you could change one thing in your life, what would it be?” She’s asked that same question every night before we hang up.

  “That I didn’t marry Frankie when I wanted to,” I said without missing a beat. “What about you?”

  “Not following my gut,” she said softly. “Good night, Blake,” she said and hung up.

  I looked at the ceiling as I thought about how she was doing with no family and no support; she literally had no one. Not one person except her girls. The burning in my stomach set in; if I ever got five minutes alone with his brothers, I would pound the shit out of them. Good thing my father was a lawyer.

  The next day, she painted the whole living room a soft blue, and it looked fucking awesome.

  Shutting the trunk, I snap out of my memory. Hailey comes to hug me around my waist. “What am I going to do without you?” she asks me as tears start to form in her eyes.

  I smile down at her. “You know I can be there in eight, maybe seven hours. Just call and I’ll be there.” She nods her head and then is taken aback when Crystal arrives and informs her of what we all knew. There was no way she would let Hailey go without her.

  Hailey turns to us, letting us know she is going to do one last walk-through of the house and wants to do it alone. We both look at each other as she walks up the stairs, and I turn to lean back on the car.

  “You guys going to be okay?” I ask Crystal as she leans next to me.

  “I think so, but it all depends on her.” Crystal shrugs her shoulders. “She decides she wants to come back, we come back.”

  “What about your job?” I look over. Crystal shrugs her shoulders again. “Will you tell her about Samantha?” I hold my breath.