Breakup In A Small Town - Kristina Knight

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even think those words. Adam was her husband; of course she wanted to try to fix him. Fix their relationship. Fix their family.

      “Well?” her mother said, sounding impatient.

      “I married him because I loved him,” she said, and Margery pounced.

      “See, right there. You loved him. Not you love him. Loved. Past tense. Jennifer Anne, there are times that you stand by your man, and there are times you have to be honest with yourself. This is one of those times.”

      One of which times? Jenny didn’t know. She wanted to stand by Adam. She loved him—not past tense, but now. As frustrating as it had sometimes been to deal with him being the fun, friendly, never-disciplined-the-kids dad, she loved the man he had been. Sometime in the past few months, though, she had lost that man, and she didn’t know if he even existed any longer. It was as if the tornado stole the Adam she knew and replaced him with this angry robot of a man.

      “I love him, Mother. Love. Present tense. Being frustrated at our situation isn’t a good reason to...to change that.” She couldn’t say the D word. She couldn’t. She didn’t want to divorce Adam. She wanted to wake him up. To bring him out of whatever place the tornado had left him, and move forward.

      “Well, I’m not sure how I can help you, then. I just got in from bridge club, and need to have dinner ready for your father in fifteen minutes. Call me when you come to your senses,” she said, and the phone clicked off.

      Jenny turned the receiver over and over in her hands. “That was a brilliant move, Jen—call dear old Mom for advice on one of her bridge days.” She replaced the receiver and went into the kitchen. She poured a cup of coffee into her favorite owl mug and sat at the counter, drumming her fingers on the granite countertop.

      Frankie’s army men were strewn around the living room, despite her three warnings that morning for him to clean them up. Jenny sighed and crossed the room. She gathered up the little green men and tossed them into the basket at the end of the sofa. A stack of Garrett’s drawings were wedged under the couch and she pulled them out.

      Garrett had drawn a picture of their house, with stick figures of Adam, Jenny, Frankie and himself standing before it. Jenny smiled. She and Adam appeared to be holding stick hands in the picture. She put the paper on the sofa, and froze. The next picture was the same house, but black clouds circled the roof and squiggly lines appeared to be attacking it. She swallowed hard.

      The tornado. She would reassure Garrett that the storm wasn’t coming back.

      Jenny flipped to another picture. This time no angry clouds buzzed the pretty yellow house her almost-six-year-old had drawn. Flowers popped up near the feet of the mom and the two kids in the picture, but a big black cloud was attacking another figure. A figure in a wheelchair. A figure with light brown hair and a frown on its face. A figure that was separated from the rest of the family and the house by a gaping black hole.

      This wasn’t right. She’d thought she and Adam had been able to hide the rift between them, at least from the kids. She gathered the pictures and put them in a drawer in the kitchen island, and then leaned against the cool granite. Jenny pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.

      She had to fix this.

       CHAPTER TWO

      ADAM SAT IN the black wheelchair in the guest room of his home and stared out the window. From here he could see the still waters of Slippery Rock Lake, and he wanted to be there. In the water. Floating.

      But he couldn’t float. He couldn’t go in the water. Couldn’t take a shower alone. He couldn’t do anything that a normal twenty-eight-year-old would do because the doctors didn’t know when the next seizure would hit. God forbid he’d drown in his own shower.

      He was supposed to be grateful that the damned tornado didn’t kill him, but what kind of life was this? Trapped in a freaking wheelchair for the foreseeable future because his brain refused to work right.

      Jenny knocked on the door. For the fifteenth time since he’d left the living room, repeating the all too familiar It will be okay that she seemed to have on permanent repeat in her mind.

      “Do you want something for dinner?”

      “No.”

      She knocked again. “I made the boys grilled cheese and tomato soup.”

      His stomach growled at the thought. He loved grilled cheese and tomato soup.

      “I don’t want grilled cheese. I don’t want soup or bologna or a freaking rib eye from the Slippery Rock Grill that you’ve cut into small, little bites for me. I don’t want anything,” he said.

      Or maybe yelled. He wasn’t sure anymore. He seemed to be yelling all the time, but then he actually said only about a hundred words a day. Most of the yelling was silent. Internal. Aimed at himself.

      Because he’d been a complete fool, and if he’d just obeyed the warning sirens, none of this would be happening. He wouldn’t be in this wheelchair. He wouldn’t have a wife who looked at him with pity in her eyes. He’d be in his workshop right now, building something with wood and tools, something that would last for decades.

      But he’d been a fool. He’d freaked out when those sirens started blaring, and instead of being a normal, healthy man, he was a head case in a wheelchair who couldn’t do anything that any other normal twenty-eight-year-old could do.

      “Well, we have to leave for the doctor’s at ten in the morning, so... I’ll wake you before the kids go to school. Let me know if you need anything before then,” she said, and her kind, nurse-like voice made his skin crawl.

      Jenny’s husky voice used to make him hot. All she’d had to do was throw her head back in laughter or say something completely ordinary like pass the salt and he had wanted her.

      Wanted to kiss her, touch her. Do dirty, dirty things to and with her.

      Now all he wanted was to be left alone, and she wouldn’t leave him alone. Why couldn’t she just leave him alone?

      He didn’t answer, and she didn’t say anything more through the door that he refused to leave open, no matter how many times she or the kids opened it. He didn’t deserve an open door, and they deserved more than to have to deal with his brokenness because of an open door.

      Adam blew out a breath. Sometimes he wished he could wheel himself down to the lake and just float away. He could borrow a boat—his friend James had one—or he could rent one of the marina boats. Set out from the marina and just flow. If Slippery Rock Lake actually led anywhere, maybe that was exactly what he would do. Man-made lakes didn’t lead anywhere, though, except right back to where a person started, and what was the point of that?

      Adam twisted the top off his bottle of soda and drank. It was too sweet, and he didn’t really like it, but what did like have to do with anything? He finished the bottle and tossed the empty plastic into the wastebasket under the cherry desk he’d built two years before.

      It was a good desk. Solidly built, but with enough design elements to also be visually appealing. There were hidden drawers, curved edges. He’d been tempted to create some kind of locking device, so that the hidden drawers would actually be inaccessible, but at the last minute decided that was a little too adventure movie-ish, and simply built them to blend into the desk itself.

      A picture of Jenny and the kids sat on the desk and he picked it up, running his fingers over their faces. He’d failed them. He hadn’t kept up his end of the bargain. He was supposed to be their protector, their provider. He was neither, and despite that fact, despite knowing that they would be better off without him, he couldn’t seem to wheel himself away.

      * * *

      FOURTEEN HOURS AND a million more reasons to let his family go later, Adam was just as uncomfortable as he had been in the guest room of his home. He sat in the exam room of his doctor’s office, waiting.

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