Page 18 of Second Chances
Chapter 11
"What do you mean, yourname isn't Charlotte? You're Charlotte O’Hare, top forty under forty Realtor, everyone knows that."
"Let's go for a drive."
"Whoa, no you don't. You can't drop a bombshell on me like that and then propose a road trip."
Charlotte walked to the entryway closet and put on her coat, she pulled out the wet one Megan had worn and held it out for her, "Let's go. I will explain everything."
"Are you okay to drive?" Megan asked, downing the last of her glass of wine.
"It was just one glass. I'm fine." Charlotte replied.
"Can we bring Timber?"
"We better, I don't want to come home and find half of that sofa ripped to shreds." Charlotte handed Megan the leash and called out to Timber.
The three of them got into the warm car and wound their way through the mountain homes, across the bridge, and into town. Charlotte navigated through the snow-covered streets and pointed out various landmarks as they passed. "There's my old high school." She pointed a gloved finger at a 1950s style brick building where a few teenage locals stood outside smoking. "There's the grocery store," she pointed out the passenger window, her arm across Megan's chest."
"Got it." Megan laughed, feeling a little guilty that she hadn't even gotten basic household items yet.
They continued driving through the small downtown core, and Megan noticed the local utility company starting to string up the Christmas lights and install pretty garlands around the lamp posts. They drove out of town and across the railroad tracks. Where the downtown homes were quaint and well-maintained, this neighborhood seemed like another world. Most of the houses seemed mid-renovation, wrapped in paper with siding partially installed. The white picket fences of downtown were replaced with either busted up boards, or chain links. Many of the houses already had Christmas lights installed, but Megan realized that they just hadn't been taken down from the past year - or ever. Charlotte pulled the shiny car off to the side of the road across from a particularly derelict bungalow. There were two hound dogs tied up in the yard who started baying as they parked. The porch stairs were missing, a small step-ladder propped up in their place, and missing panes of windows were repaired with cardboard and duct tape. Megan wondered if an angry meth addict could come busting out the front door at any minute.
"Char? What are we doing here?" she asked over the yips and barks of the hound dogs. Timber growled protectively from the back seat.
"This is where I grew up. That window there..." She pointed at the one with the cardboard, "was the room I shared with my sister."
Never in a million years would Megan have guessed that the glamorous woman sitting beside her in a hundred-thousand-dollar car grew up in a hovel like the one she was staring at.
"They certainly have let it go," Megan whispered.
"Oh no. It looks pretty much the same as when we lived there, although it looks like they're actually paying their light bill."
Megan looked at her friend's face, expecting to see some kind of emotion, but Charlotte's eyes were dark. "Lauren and I would crawl under the front porch when we were kids and imagine that we were in a time machine. Or, not even a time machine, just a machine that would take us anywhere. She always wanted to go back to the wild west, she loved horses, but I just wanted to go to a city. I never picked a specific one. Just a city, somewhere where I could be no one."
"That's really sad, Char." Megan reached out to grasp her friend's hand.
"My name is Billie-Jo."
Megan's instinct was to laugh, but the seriousness on her friend's face told her that it wasn't a joke.
"Billie-Jo Bunkman, Chance Rapids’ blow-job queen."
"Okay, you lost me. What are you talking about?"
Charlotte put the car in gear, made a three-point turn in front of the shack, and then headed back towards town. "That was the rumor about me."
Megan looked at her elegant friend, the one who dated the top bachelors in the city, the one who could get a dinner reservation with the drop of her name and couldn't believe what she was hearing.
"Well, Char, that's the past."
"It isn't true Meg! I was a goddamn virgin," Charlotte yelled and slapped her gloved hand on the steering wheel. "I was the poorest kid in school, I had one sweatshirt, and half the time I didn't have anything to eat for lunch, the other half I had bologna and ketchup sandwiches. Needless to say, I was not popular, but for some reason, the popular girls in school decided to turn everyone against me. They started the rumors, and well, my initials didn't help..."
"That's terrible, girls can be so cruel," Megan couldn't believe what she was hearing, there were obviously a few more layers to peel from Charlotte like an onion. Charlotte didn't know why the girls had started their vendetta against her, but the woman was beautiful, and even the poor small-town version of Charlotte must have been a stunner.
"They were, I had no friends, I couldn't wait to get the hell out of here."
"Then, why did you buy a house here?"
