Dark Bend

Chapter One

The digital alarm clock beside the bed sounds at 5:00am but Paula Quindlen, lying flat on her back in the darkness, is already awake.  She woke up maybe half-an-hour earlier and has been resting her eyes since, leaving the alarm on just in case she fell asleep again.  Even so, she hits the snooze button, buying herself another ten minutes to stay in bed.  Her problem is not that she’s tired.  It’s that she wants to postpone facing the world just a little longer.

Come on, Paula, it’s a Saturday morning, she tells herself.  You love Saturday mornings.  Remember how, when you were a kid, on a Saturday morning the weekend seemed as if it would last forever?

A nice memory, but there’s a problem with that bit of encouragement:  Paula is not a kid anymore.  She’s thirty-eight years old.  She lives alone.  She’s lived alone for quite some time, and she fears this may become a permanent condition of her existence.  So what, then, if the weekend looks as if it will last forever from the vantage point of a Saturday morning?  What good does it do Paula to have an open weekend, if she has no one with whom to enjoy the time off?

Okay, now you’re just wallowing in self-pity.  Face it:  the guy’s not available to you.  It’s disappointing, yes, but someone else will come along eventually.  Don’t give up hope based on this one setback.

Here again, there’s a problem with optimistic thinking:  it hasn’t been just one setback.  It’s been several setbacks in recent years, and each new defeat seems to hurt more than the last.  Paula wonders:  is it the defeat itself, or the accumulation of defeats, that’s killing her spirit?

You need to get up.  The longer you lie here, the more you’re going to torment yourself.

That much is true.  Paula knows she is not doing herself any good by staying under the covers, bellyaching.  She needs to stick with her plan for the morning.

-o-

Last night was a bad night for Paula Quindlen, but to understand why it was a bad night, one has to travel nearly eight months back in time.  For it was in January of this year that she met him, after which the whole sorry affair was launched.

Paula has worked at the same company for five years now.  She doesn’t like the job all that much, but it gave her an opportunity to leave her small hometown and move here—“to the big city”—as she long dreamed of doing but, for so many years, could never quite bring herself to do.  She wanted to introduce an element of change into her life, and she thought a good first step would be to make a clean break with the past—the past that surrounded her and would continue to surround her so long as she stayed rooted in the little municipality of her birth.  So she did some looking, found a job here in the city with requirements that reasonably matched her credentials and abilities, submitted a resume, and, to her delight, been asked for an interview.  Presto!  A few weeks later she packed her bags and left to start her new job.  Her parents and siblings were sad to see her go, and indeed Paula had experienced second thoughts as she was driving up here in her U-Haul.  But she believed she’d made the right decision.  She wanted to do things, see things, and, yes, meet someone, though she kept that last part of her calculus a secret.  She’d had no luck back home, where the pickings were slim anyway due to a low population.  Here she’d expected to have a much bigger crop of guys from which to choose—and has since turned out to be right.  Unfortunately, even with this larger group, she has not been having much luck.

Brad Halliwell, she thought at one time, was going to change that for her.

He was hired at the beginning of the year and sent to work in Logistical Support, Paula’s department.  The head of the department had introduced their newest co-worker, and, while doing so, had stated his hope that the other employees would help Brad feel at home.  After all, he said, this company was one big happy family, right?  (Yeah, sure…)