Chapter 18
Melissa shut the front door then rushed to the kitchen window and peeked out it. She made it just in time to see the tail end of Gabriel’s truck disappear. Seeing him go generated a pang of sadness so powerful, it radiated throughout her entire being. She missed him, plain and simple, and would have to wait more than twelve hours to see him again. Twelve hours seemed like eternity. She needed to find a way to pass the time. She needed to busy herself.
She slung her backpack over the back of a kitchen chair and set about inspecting the house, intent on finding a distraction. Loads of laundry needed to be done, the dishwasher needed to be filled and run and the floors looked as though they could stand to be swept and mopped.
She busied herself with housework that took far too little time to complete. Before long, she found herself wandering to the family room at the rear of the house.
Each time she entered the room, she felt a blend of equal parts relief and grief. The room had been her mother’s favorite. Added when Melissa was three, it had not been part of the original construct. It was a playroom during Melissa’s earlier years and was now a cozy TV room.
Her mother, Jennifer Martin, influenced every article of the room. Her image gazed out from framed photographs that filled the interior wall and offered the story of a happy family of three. Such pictures comforted Melissa on most days but pained her on others.
In this particular room, her mother still existed. The happy family was still intact, even if only in pictures. It was as if the cancer had never claimed her mother.
Growing up she imagined her mother looked out beyond the glass, past the void and into the room. She dreamed that her mother lived beyond her grasp but still in sight. As she grew to be a teenager, such notions were abandoned and replaced with the bitter truth: the photographs held no cosmic magic. They did not exist as a portal between two worlds. They were simply representations of the past.
She stepped into the family room. Her feet were immediately greeted by thick, plush carpeting that cushioned her every step. She looked about the space. Long and rectangular and decorated in various shades of brown, the room ran the length of the house.
She moved past the entryway, each tread protected and supported by the plush carpet. Selected by her mother, the tan carpet maintained near-new quality. Her mother lovingly deep-cleaned them regularly to keep them clean for her daughter and to uphold the best possible appearance of the fibers.
The carpet, nearly fourteen years old, was still meticulously maintained by her father who believed that preserving his late wife’s routine preserved her presence.
And preserve it he did as Melissa’s mother even existed in the furniture that outfitted the room. An inviting leather sectional, selected before her death, still occupied the far-right corner of the room and was positioned in front of their forty-inch plasma screen television.
Along the internal wall where the television stood and the photographs hung, a simple, inexpensive desk resided. The cherry wood stained table was two tiered and wobbled dangerously. It housed the family computer. Though different from the computer her mother had sat at while earning her Associate’s Degree online, the current model closely resembled the former.
The shaky bureau, assembled by her father, had endured countless wallops. Many nights of frustrating Internet poker tournaments provided ample opportunities for him to whack, bang and smash his hand against it adding to its instability. Fortunately, a sleek laptop computer served as a portable workstation and homework center for Melissa as opposed to the sad, sagging desk.
Passing the desk and pausing to study her mother’s smiling face frozen in time and preserved by a simple wooden frame, Melissa sat on the welcoming sofa. Enveloped in the soft folds of its fibers, she relaxed. After locating the remote control, she turned on the television. But just as she positioned herself in the cushions, her cell phone sounded and indicated that a message awaited her.
She sprang from her snug spot and jogged to the kitchen. Her phone sat atop the counter. She touched an icon on the screen and was brought to a message. I miss you was all it said. The sender’s number was Gabriel’s cell phone. She smiled and was struck by how three simple terms wielded such enormous power. Her mood lightened significantly. She smiled broadly and returned to her niche on the couch.
After an hour of staring vacantly at the television screen but not actually watching anything in particular, she turned her attention to preparing dinner. But whether attempting to view a program on television or getting dinner started, Melissa struggled to concentrate. Her mind wandered and drifted from whatever task was at hand and found its way to Gabriel. The mere thought of his name sent shivers racing across her skin and a smile tugging the corners of her mouth. She had never been so preoccupied with a boy. She prided herself on not being the type of girl who sat through class, lost in a daydream, doodling hearts with the name of a boy at each center. Yet now, she stood with a package of chicken in one hand and the refrigerator door ajar, fantasizing about Gabriel.
She blinked several times, tried to erase his image from her mind long enough to get dinner started. But halfway through her process, the familiar rumble of the automatic garage door opening distracted her. The garage door opening meant that her father was home from work.
Her father held the position of produce manager at the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company more commonly known as the A&P Supermarket in the neighboring town of Hartwell Cross. His commute was a mere seven minutes from home which allowed him to return from work shortly after her. Predictably, the door opposite the small half bathroom in the short corridor off the main hallway opened and her dad’s footsteps could be heard advancing toward the kitchen.
“Hey Dad,” Melissa called out “Take your shoes off please. I cleaned today.”
“Hey Miss,” he answered. “Already did.”
Melissa could hear her father fumbling and muttering in the hallway immediately followed by the sound of a work boot hitting the floor then another.
“Thank you,” she called out letting him know she was aware of his shoe transgression.
She smiled as she ribbed him. Her father was a hardworking man. Each day he came home after a nine-hour shift dirty and tired. Such was his routine six days a week. This day was no different.
He came into the kitchen with socked feet holding the mail in one hand and a stainless-steel coffee thermos in the other. His black uniform sweater was littered with stickers from various fruits and vegetables and his pants had patches where mud had caked to them.
“Fried chicken with rice and broccoli sound good?” Melissa inquired though she knew it was her father’s favorite meal.
“Sounds great,” he responded as he dropped his coffee mug and a stack of bills and sale circulars atop the counter. “So? Did your day get any better?”
“Oh yeah,” Melissa responded and couldn’t refrain from grinning as she spoke.
Her father looked worried. He furrowed his brow and asked, “Not too good I hope.”
Blushing, Melissa protested, “No dad. It was nothing like that. Gabriel and I just drove and drove. We drove all the way to the state line, had McDonalds and came back.”
“McDonald’s huh. That’s all?” her father probed. He narrowed his gray eyes and studied her face.
“I promise, Dad. We stopped at a scenic rest stop place. We sat on a picnic bench and talked.”
She left out the part when Gabriel professed his feelings for her and held her hand. Such details would be unwise to share with her overprotective father.
“That Gabriel kid seems all right. Not like that piece of crap Kevin Anderson. I’d like to kick his teeth down his arrogant throat. “Christopher fumed.
“Me, too,” she agreed. “If you could’ve seen him today, I mean, arrogant doesn’t even begin to describe him. He was beyond obnoxious. He was cruel, trying to shame me.”
“Shame you? You didn’t mention that on the phone this morning. Wh
at was he trying to shame you about?”
“Nothing Dad, really,” Melissa lied.
Although she was generally against lying, she felt obliged to spare her father’s feelings. She knew he felt no shame in going to work daily, that he never regarded his job as menial or embarrassing. He did not love it by any means, but was a practical man who viewed his job as a means to an end. His job neither defined him nor limited him. But hearing the blatant insults of a pompous teenage boy might give him pause. Melissa would not risk opening the door of uncertainty for her father.
But he stood before her, scrutinizing her expression. She did not want to disgrace him with the cruelty of Kevin’s words, but she was a lousy liar. She felt the warmth of truth spread across her cheeks as she tried to avoid direct eye contact with her father.
“Melissa, I can look at your face and tell that you’re lying. Now what the hell else did he say?” Her father demanded.
“He just, well, he just said stuff about where you work and how I’d end up working part time for you and going to community college, if I were lucky. Like that’s somehow a bad thing.”
Her father folded his arms across his broad chest and grew silent. Her stomach clenched and churned simultaneously. She had dishonored her father. And though it had not been intentional, indirect, in fact, Melissa hated herself for it. She damned Kevin under her breath before weighing in with her thoughts.
“Dad, I am not ashamed of where you work. Your job supported me and mom when I was little and supports me just fine now,” she said. “He’s the jerk who should be ashamed of what he did to me and what he would have done had Gabriel not been where he was when he was.”
Melissa watched how the mere mention of her mother caused her dad’s eyes to moisten. In the days, months and years that followed her mother’s death, sadness was her father’s constant companion. It had slipped in and replaced his wife. She knew then that depression bore down on him with a mighty heft. She heard him explain to his mother, her grandmother, that breathing was an effort, getting up and facing each day, a challenge. She never wanted to contribute to all that burdened him.
She saw how being brought back to a time, even briefly, when his wife was alive made breathing difficult again. She hated being responsible for that.
After he took a moment and collected himself, the sentiment passed and he rejoined their conversation.
“I could kill the bastard!” he said through gritted teeth.
“I know, I know.”
“To think that what you told me on the phone earlier,” he began. “About how he and his fancy-ass lawyers have cooked up some story about you being a pill popper and conspiring with a guy who’s lived here for what, a week, is crazy. It’s just plain crazy.”
“I know. The worst part is, because he and his family are who they are, people will believe them.”
“Some people, Melissa. Damn stupid people if you ask me.”
“Yeah, but a lot of kids at school were paying attention when he was talking, like a bunch of sheep. It’s pretty obvious he’s going to make my life there a nightmare.”
“Well, we’ll figure out a way to fight back. We’re not going to let these rich pieces of crap get the best of us. Besides, we have the truth on our side and DNA. We’ll fight.”
In the moments that she was verbally attacked by Kevin, Melissa had forgotten the forensic aspect of the case and that he had been charged with a crime, not her.
She considered how, in his hubris, Kevin had pranced and pleaded his case in front of a jury of easily influenced teenagers. He could argue that her injuries had been sustained as he fought against her and Gabriel, that they’d been the attackers. After all, he had a more battered face than she did. But none of that mattered in a court of law. Everything Kevin was attempting to do was for the benefit of onlookers in the court of public opinion, which in this case, were his parents and his peers. Eventually, the students at Harbingers High School, and perhaps even Kevin’s parents, would be forced to accept the ugly truth about him. He was a monster.
Melissa’s father scanned the mail while she contemplated her predicament. Their thoughtful and mutual silence was interrupted by his words.
“Melissa, I’m sorry I can’t afford to send you to the colleges you deserve to go to,” he said self-consciously, not looking up from the papers he held.
She realized then that Kevin had managed to spread his poisonous words and infect her father’s self-esteem and undermine his ability to provide properly for his only child. Her hatred for Kevin deepened. She did not think it possible. But now, she loathed him with every cell in her body. He had hurt her father, a good and decent man she adored.
Melissa turned from the chicken she was breading.
“Forget that, Dad! You have nothing to feel guilty about,” she declared. “You’ve always taken good care of me and been a good father. College credits are college credits. Don’t let what that jackass Kevin said get in your head. The Andersons, they should be ashamed of the monster they created!”
Considering her last point, her father looked up and met her eyes and said, “Huh” before he walked to the counter where her hands worked to bread chicken tenders and kissed the top of her head.
“I guess I have lots to be proud of,” he said. “Look what I’ve created.”
He then turned and walked out of the kitchen and ascended the steep staircase.