At Sunset (ChickLit)

Chapter Two

It had been a couple days since she’d hung up on her husband and never once did the phone get plugged back in. She was sure he’d tried calling again, probably just to yell and scream at her about how pissed she’d made him but he just didn’t understand that he had unknowingly, broke a part of her. She felt beaten, wounded and foreign.

Everyday passed with the sort of sluggish activities that happened the day before. The same hourly check-ins, the same whimpering from her son and the same bland food. She wrote that too.

If Wes was there he would’ve gotten her some good food. From McDonalds, she thought smugly, he would’ve gotten me something from McDonalds. She knew him so well.  She even on occasions, when he was gone, wondered if it was possible that if he would ever leave her, if a part of her would fall apart and would retreat with him and that all she knew about him would simply just disappear or turn twisted and incorrect.

She dreamt of a burger, piled high with lettuce and tomatoes with melted cheese and the different condiments.  She could almost taste it on her tongue.

“Mrs. Walker,” a nurse came in ripping her out of her dreamland. This nurse was new; she’d never seen her before. “It seems that you’ve been scheduled for discharge tomorrow around twelve in the afternoon.”

She acknowledged her with a short nod realizing her next problem. Who’ll pick me up? She ran her fingers along her son’s cheek and gazed out the window. It felt so strange being with someone you care about but all the while feeling lonely.

“Will someone be there to pick you up?” she asked writing her name on the dry-erase board set up on the wall. Ellen.

“No, my husband is away on business and I have no family members here,” she said sadly. The woman obviously caught on and announced that she could call any friends for her and if all else failed, a taxi.

Melanie honestly did not want to bring her new born baby home in a car sat in by hundreds of dirty, possibly diseased people but what else did she have? Her only friends were away on vacation and no one she knew was in an hour radius of the hospital. She would be left with the taxi. Her parents though living in North Carolina lived far away in Charlotte while she lived near the South Carolina border near a small beach town called Calabash. She actually lived a little farther out than the little sandy town, more towards Sunset Beach which was technically a little island that you had to cross a bridge and a marsh to reach. Her home was a small little cottage a little ways out, on a dead end road with no neighbors for miles. It suited her fine.

She’d remembered the first day her and Wes got there with only a couple of suitcases. They’d needed to buy furniture, but it was before Wes had been promoted in his work and they had any real spending money. All luxury items were rare in the house and three years later they still were. Melanie’s hair had been the same since she was a teenager, a dirty blond with a long plain cut. She’d never colored her hair because they never had the money, but if she did she would have gone with something more vibrant, like red.

They’d finally bought furniture a year after moving in but had only obtained the basics. A couch and small TV for the living room (unlike her Wes actually liked to watch TV, she more enjoyed her books), a bed for the bedroom, a dresser, a couple lamps and a rug for the bathroom. Most of the house was carpeted anyway and the closet was spacious enough for Wes and her to share so they didn’t really need much. She opened the blinds every morning so they didn’t have to turn on the lights and when it was too hot in the summer she’d put the screen door to use and cut off the air. During winter it got a little difficult and she would always have to walk around wearing a jacket and extra socks. She was able to keep most of the house insulated by stuffing towels along under the doors so the gaps were sealed. Wes had always taken careful account of the trouble she’d gone too to make their lives cheaper and simpler and he’d thanked her many times for it.