Chasing Cold Sand

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

The evening air was crisp and cool, flooding into Nikki’s nostrils as she jogged up the path in the dwindling sunlight. It was half-past six, and she was in a rush to return home. After a minute, she had reached the tree line, breaking through its embrace to her back yard. There was a light on in the kitchen and a black silhouette moving back and forth behind the large curtain that draped the window.

Her house was two stories tall, white siding covering the walls. The windows varied in size; to the left of the kitchen was a floor-to-ceiling glass window that looked into the large living room area. The black curtains looked subtle; not too harsh but not too bright to overdo the white. It was a pleasant home with a once pleasant family.

Slowly, Nikki plodded up the deck stairs to the open back door that entered into the kitchen. She could already envision herself laying out in the sun on a blistering hot day, catching up on her tan on the large deck. This was where she used to spend time with her family when they were all together.

Now it just looked vacant; the lawn chairs had acquired a layer of dust, along with the table and large umbrella near the edge. The sun’s rays had almost nearly bleached the colors dull, giving it only a matter of time before the dirt would take command of the color.

There was a smell of burning food emanating from the kitchen. There was a small sigh that escaped her lips before she walked into the kitchen just as her father pulled out a charred pizza from the oven. Smoke billowed from the hot oven, but it all managed to escape through the doorway, into the night air. Nikki quickly turned off the oven and gestured for her father to put the pizza down on the empty stove top.

“Why can’t I get anything done around here without something bad happening,” her father muttered, waving out the small amount of smoke with his hands. “Can’t cook, can’t clean, can’t do anything.”

Nikki threw away the pizza in a separate trash bag to throw away separately. “That’s not true. You make money for the both of us,” Nikki said after depositing the pizza into the bag and just outside the door. “If I didn’t have you, how would I eat?”

“You’d find a way,” came his grunt of a reply. “You’d find a way, just like your mother did.”

Nikki wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but she didn’t spend time pondering over it. There were many times in a day when he would reference back to her mother, trying to tie anything he could with the memory he had left of her.

His brown eyes were sunken into his skull, along with his cheeks. There wasn’t a moment of the day when his eyes weren’t full of despair. He had lost a decent amount of weight since the accident. Amy was right about one thing, though; before all of this had happened, her father was a good looking man in his mid-forties. His muscle tone was above average, and his smile was the sweetest part about him.

Nikki couldn’t remember a time that he smiled since the accident.

Her father threw his work name tag onto the table. His name was Henry Dawson, and he worked as a financial advisor in their town. People would come and ask for his opinion and pay him for it. Nikki thought that was a good enough job for him.

He pulled his hand through his light brown hair, the same color of Matthew’s. Instantly, her heart sank, but she tried to keep her head held high. She felt like she had to set an example to her father that you had to move on, even if everything in your life was crumbling down right in front of your eyes. They were going to have to get used to these changes no matter what.

“You know what,” he said, clasping his hands together. “Why don’t you cook something simple tonight for supper and we’ll call it an early night.”