Page 9 of Steal My Breath Away

“Now… I’ve changed my mind about dinner,” Dad said. “I saw a can of beans downstairs and I’ve decided we’ll try mixing beans and potatoes with a little chipotle and create something new. Call me impulsive. Call me crazy…”

“But don’t call me late for dinner!” I shouted out one of our favorite family sayings.

“I hope you’ve got a good appetite,” Dad said to Ace. “I’m not letting you go home tonight until you’ve tasted my new dish, so both of you get back to work. We’ve got a lot of chopping to do, and I’m pretty sure Matt’s not going to lend a hand when he gets home.”

He was right about Matt. Lately, my brother had been refusing to do a lot of things, and particularly anything that involved cooking. He preferred to spend his time building his model planes, tracking planes in the sky, or playing airplane simulation games in the basement with Ace or Rafael. Sometimes he locked himself upstairs in his room and listened to music so loud it made the house shake. Ace, on the other hand, never refused any requestmy parents made of him. He dutifully grabbed another onion and got to work.

I glanced over at him as he chopped. I’d never really thought about the fact that Ace was always looking out for me. He’d saved me from a few falls in the playground over the last few weeks, and he’d stepped in one afternoon when Chris Sturgess and his friends were harassing Paige and me after school. He’d even rescued the cookies Paige and I had made for the school bake sale moments before they’d turned into a blackened mess in the oven. I hoped I could return the favor. Maybe someday I could save Ace, too.

CHAPTER 5Ace

I hated afternoons.

Afternoon meant the 3:00P.M. arrival of Mrs. Janice Welling, a sixty-five-year-old widow, nurse administrator at Riverstone’s only hospital, and my deceased grandmother’s best friend. Janice never bothered to knock or ring the bell. She opened the door with the spare key my grandmother had given her years ago and walked right in.

I don’t know why I tolerated the intrusion, only that I likely would have starved to death if she hadn’t brought me dinner every day. I wasn’t interested in cooking. Two weeks ago, I’d come back to my grandmother’s small bungalow in Riverstone, locked the door, and started drinking the pain away.

She’d showed up exactly three days after I’d arrived. I went to bed in the darkness and woke up in the light. Janice had cleaned up the garbage, tidied the house, bought groceries, and cooked a meal. “Your grandmother would have done no less for my Dan,” she said, referring to her son who had been injured in a car accident and now ran a hardware store in the center of town.

After that, she stopped by every day. I was grateful for the hot meals. Not so grateful for the incessant chatter that accompanied them. Still on my forced “vacation,” and with no desire to leave the house, I was a captive audience.

So, every day at 2:45P.M., I pulled on a clean shirt, ran a comb through my hair, sat at the kitchen table, and persevered to honor my grandmother, who would have been ashamed of the state I was in. I persevered when Janice pulled open the curtains to let in the sun, imagining the moment when she left, and I could plungethe house into darkness again. I persevered when she boiled the kettle and poured two cups of tea. And when she settled down to tell me all the news in town, I persevered, praying she wouldn’t mention the one name I most dreaded hearing on her lips.

Perseverance would take me through the one hour and twenty-seven minutes of Janice’s daily visit until she looked at her watch and said, “Oh my. Look at the time.” And then, as soon as she was gone, I ate the meal she’d prepared, pulled out a bottle of whiskey, and drank until I could slip into a coma where the nightmares wouldn’t find me.

At least that’s how things usually went. But not today.

“Ace?”

My bedroom door creaked open, and I threw my arm over my face to block out the light streaming in my doorway. Although my grandmother had passed away over four years ago, I still slept in my old bedroom. I’d never had a room of my own growing up, and it was comforting to sleep in a place that had always and would always be mine.

“Janice…” I groaned. “What are you doing here so early in the morning?”

“NineA.M. is not early.” Janice marched over to the window and pulled the blinds, searing my eyes with sunshine. “Are you ill?”

I wanted to lie, to tell her I had the plague or some other highly contagious disease, but I was long past hiding anything from Janice. “Jeff didn’t show up with my delivery yesterday. It was a bad night.”

Jeff was the grocer’s son, the grocer being Ben Galloway, a member of my senior class, who had taken over his father’s store when his dad passed away. I had a standing order for exactly two bottles of whiskey to be delivered every day at 5:00P.M. It was the perfect way to end each day.

“Well, today’s a new day. You’ve been locked away in this house for the last two weeks, and now it’s time to start living again. You need to take a shower and get dressed so you can eat your breakfastbefore Senator Chapman arrives. She wants to have a little chat with you.”

“Wait. What? Why?” I pushed myself up to sit. “How does she even know I’m here?”

Matt and Haley’s mother was the last person I wanted to see. It had been hard enough to talk to her at the funeral. Hard to shake the hand of the woman who had welcomed me into her home and treated me like one of her own. Hard to listen to her tell me it wasn’t my fault when I knew I was to blame. Matt would never have joined the air force if not for me. He wouldn’t have been in the B52-H that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea during a routine air refueling training mission. He would have come home safe to his family, just like I promised Haley. Instead, he returned in a coffin.

“You’ll find out when she gets here.” She patted my shoulder and a few moments later I heard her bustling in the kitchen. I briefly considered returning to my bed, but I knew she would be back. Janice didn’t take no for an answer.

“Well, that’s better.” Janice smiled when I joined her twenty minutes later at the kitchen table. She handed me a cup of tea and a plate of bacon and eggs.

I gave a noncommittal nod and took a sip of the bitter brown liquid she’d poured for me. I hated tea. I hated the taste, the heat, the reminder of sitting around the fire in the desert at night on deployment with Matt talking about our plans for a future that would never come to be.

“I was talking to Esme Duncan about you,” Janice said. “I told her you were back. She offered to come out and visit to cheer you up. Didn’t you two used to date?”

“Briefly, but that was long ago, and I’m not interested in seeing anyone while I’m on vacation. I don’t want to give any wrong messages.” The last thing I needed was Esme Duncan in my house. I’d dated her in high school. Although I’d ended our relationship before I left home, she’d made it clear that she was willing to wait for me no matter how long it took. I didn’t have the heart to tell her itwould be forever. There was only one woman I truly wanted—the woman I could never have.

“I think she just meant to come out as a friend,” Janice said. “She’s engaged to Blake Forester. Do you remember Blake?”

Yes, I knew Blake. He was the quarterback of the football team and the guy I’d beaten up after I caught him taking Haley to “see the stars” during her first high school dance.

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