Page 2 of The Ex Next Door
“We’ll have to ask our landlord but if she says it’s okay, then yes, of course!”
“Yay!” Naomi clapped her hands, looking so joyous that Amy wanted to cry.
She had such good-natured children. But she hadn’t been able to give them the one thing they really wanted: parents who loved each other.
The moving truck pulled up outside and Amy ran to meet it. Driven by her mother’s boyfriend, Lou, it contained Amy’s life for the past ten years. Furniture, pots and pans, her wedding china and silver, clothes and toys. All her memories in boxes.
Her mother pulled up soon after, parking on the street. Moonbeam Miller, child of hippies, was back to the crunchy-granola girl of her youth. Mom turned her back on her parents’ nomadic ways and named her only daughter a very safe name. You couldn’t get much more conservative of a name than Amy. But Mom had changed after her husband an absolute pillar of everything traditional, had the nerve to die of cancer. It was like she cut loose from some kind of imaginary tether. She now seemed to embrace her flowery past, and in her sixties, she’d gone into business with Lou, buying a garden center in town they called Back to the Fuchsia.
She walked up to Amy, embraced her in a huge hug andpulled out a wand of what appeared to be dead branches from her beaded purse.
“What’s that?” Amy scrunched up her nose.
“It’s sage. Normally, you burn it to ward off any negative energy, but we don’t want to smoke out thechildren. I consulted with Willow at the gem store, and she said it will be okay to just wave it around.”
“Wave it…around?”
“Yes, up in the air like this.” She lifted it above her like a torch, looking like a middle-aged Statue of Liberty wearing bangles and braids.
“Mom, I don’t know about this.”
Her mother had raised Amy in the most traditional of ways, but now often expressed her dismay that Amy couldn’t open her eyes and mind. A fortune teller Mom had consulted recently told her that Rob and Amy had been doomed from the beginning. An easy guess when you already knew the outcome. She forecast that Amy was going to meet someone new very soon. And also, that she should watch her high blood pressure. Amy happened to be a few pounds overweight for most of her married life, but her blood pressure had been finebeforethe divorce.
“It can’t hurt. And after the year you’ve had, I think you need all the help you can get.”
Amy couldn’t argue there.
Naomi and David ran to greet their grandma the moment she walked in the door and then followed her around, watching in fascination.
Outside, Lou opened the back of the moving truck and waved Amy over.
“I’m sorry I can’t help much, darlin’. You know, my back.” He put a hand low on his back, where he’d been hurt yearsbefore in a roofing accident. “Falling two stories was no picnic.”
“That’s okay, Lou. I’ve got this.” Amy pulled out a box and hefted it into the house.
“Young people. Enjoy your youth, Amy. It goes by fast.” Lou followed her up the lawn she shared with her next-door neighbor, carrying Naomi’s rainbow unicorn backpack.
“Yes it did.” Amy snorted when she set the box down. “Like a blink.”
“Aw, c’mon now. You’re still a young whippersnapper,” Lou cackled. “Where’s David? Is he hiding again?”
“David doesn’t hide anymore,” Amy said. “He learned his lesson.”
It was something he’d done as a toddler and preschooler, scaring anyone babysitting him.
“I’ll help you, Lou!” David appeared, flexed his bicep and ran outside to the truck. “I can lift a lot of pounds.”
“Sure you can, little buddy.” Lou patted his head as David flew by him.
A few more boxes came in easily, Amy, Mom, David and Naomi lifting the heavier ones together.
“We can do this,” Naomi said, baffled at being able to lift the boxes.
“Don’t look so surprised. We can do a lot of things you don’t know about as a team,” Amy said. “Just wait and see.”
The problem came when they were hauling in a particularly heavy box. Mom and Lou stood by directing since the box was so tall they couldn’t see ahead of them. Amy pushed from one end and both David and Naomi pulled from the other.
“I shouldn’t have packed this one so full,” Amy said, winded.
