At Sunset (ChickLit)

Chapter One

Terminal Cancer was just another fancy name for the road block in Melanie Walker’s way. The doctors warned her that not only was she never going to recover, but this would most likely be the most painful thing that she will ever deal with in the rest of her life.

But she knew different from that. The greatest pain she would deal with for the rest of her life is knowing that she’d never see her six pound, two ounce baby boy grow up to be a man.

He’d came two weeks early and had flipped almost immediately after her having been placed in the bed.

The nurses had her doing some eccentric rocking maneuvers that not only made her nauseas, but also contributed to wanting to punch the leading nurse’s face in when she was told of no progress. It was going to be a long night.

At five- forty two in the morning, after five and a half hours of laboring her son into the world, he was finally there in her arms. All blue eyed and shriveled like a prune, he rested in her arms sucking on a binky the hospital provided and was finally drifting off.

“My boy.” Melanie whispered to no one really. It was no wonder that when she gave the quick erratic call to her husband as she waited on the steps of their small cabin for the paramedics that he was not going to make it in time to see their son take his first breath.

Instead, he’d be pushing an elevator button to a top executive office to meet with the big men to discuss a business proposition which could include a one way ticket to the Big Apple.

Melanie didn’t want to tell him before he left that it wasn’t going to work. Melanie wouldn’t be able to take the city life, not after years of the noiseless North Carolina coast.

She’d lived there all her life. Her mother and father brought her and her two younger brothers into the world there and she had honestly thought she would be able to bring her own, raise her own and die there. New York had never been an option for her, not when she was living at home with her parents, mooching off of their money and the spare bedroom upstairs, never for one second did she think that could change.

She knew her cancer like the back of her hand. She knew what her limits were, how to handle any information given to her by her specialist and doctors and most importantly, how she viewed herself. Her therapist suggested therapy through writing. Taking her advice Melanie started a journal the very day.

She never liked pity; she hadn’t wanted pity from the get go. Though, in the moments she had to herself when her husband went to his desk she drew to herself and in the shadows of her bedroom, in the tacky rug chair under the window and the dark night sky, she let her tears run freely until there weren’t any left. She only left the dark when it was time for dinner. Wes sat with his back to her, head in his hands letting out slow labored breaths.

“It’ll be alright,” she had said only eleven months ago. He didn’t say anything. She wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders and rested her cheek against his neck. She could feel the heat radiating off his body.

“We’ll be alright Wes.”

This time he did acknowledge her, with a small nod and a sigh. “I feel so useless.”