Kristina Knight - Breakup In A Small Town

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. Jenny sat in the plastic-backed chair against the wall. He’d left the wheelchair in favor of sitting on the too-short bed thing in the office. The protective strip of paper on it crackled when he moved, so he did his best to remain still.

Jenny was checking her phone.

“Everything okay?” His voice sounded rough and unused. So, pretty much the new normal.

“Just checking in with your dad. We were supposed to ship the new cabinet fronts for the Wareham project in Joplin today.”

“Supposed to?” he asked, because supposed to made it sound as if the shipment didn’t happen.

Jenny sighed. “He decided to ship them with the countertops next week.” She put her phone into her purse. “I’ll call the project manager when we get done here, straighten it out.”

Adam didn’t say anything. What was there to say? He didn’t know anything about the Wareham project; maybe it made sense to ship the tops and fronts at the same time.

Jenny watched him for a long while, as if waiting for him to say something or do something more than sit on the edge of the exam table. Finally, she blew out a breath and took her phone from her bag again. While she tapped the keys, he watched the clock on the wall click off two minutes and twenty-five seconds. Then the doctor came in.

“Adam, Jenny, how are you both doing today?” Dr. Lambert wore gray pants and New Balance running shoes. Under his crisp, white lab coat, he wore a pink polo shirt. Adam didn’t answer his question.

“We’re fine. No seizures since our visit two weeks ago,” Jenny said, as if she spoke for him all the time.

“Sixteen days, if you want to be exact.” Because sixteen days sounded so much better than two weeks. Two was nothing. Sixteen, that sounded like progress, at least to Adam. Jenny raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

“Good, good.” Lambert made a notation on his tablet. “We’ll keep the same dosage, same meds for now. This could be the cocktail we’ve been looking for. Adam, how are you feeling?”

“Fine,” he said.

“No more headaches?”

Adam shook his head, not caring that it was a lie. The headaches were much better than they had been the first few days after he’d woken up in the hospital. Instead of pounding at his brain like a hammer, they were more of a dull throb. And instead of lasting all day, they were an hour or so at the most. Nothing he couldn’t deal with. Besides, his head shake seemed to make Jenny feel better. Her shoulders didn’t seem so stiff now.