Page 31 of Wrecked By You

Immediately, he responded.I wish I was there. I wish you were cooking for me today.

I texted him back, feeling like a teenager with her first crush.I wish you were here too.

I drove home and put on my running clothes. I had taken a sandwich for lunch, and I wasn’t really hungry. I guess it was the first-love jitters. During my run, I kept thinking about how differently I felt and how just today I was trying to face my past, my mother, and even my father.

I’d been pushing away the fact that I could go testify against him at his parole hearing coming up. Did I want to do that? Did I want to face him? Did I want to get into what I knew would be some type of argument with my mother? I probably had to if I was going to stay in this town.

I got back to my house. Even if it was a rented house, it felt good to have a place of my own. I decided to make myself some tacos. I was grateful to Wendy for leaving some packages of hamburger. I could use the other packages for the spaghetti I would make for Damon and his children. My mind raced as I made the tacos for myself. I needed to get things in shape in the house.

I quickly said a prayer and then ate my tacos. There wasn’t much for me to clean up, but I washed the dishes and then decided I would put together the furniture first as much as possible. I rearranged the dining room and slanted the table. I went to the front room and rearranged things in there, and when I stepped back and took it in, I realized it actually looked pretty good.

I needed some things on the walls, but of course I didn’t have money for that. The paint can in the corner caught my eye, and I decided to try something.

I went to the barn, where I remembered seeing a bunch of old furniture. I picked through some of the wall hangings and paintings. I knew I could get rid of the stuff if I wanted to, but maybe I could reuse some. There were some other oil paints, canvases, and a bunch of paintbrushes. I carried them back to the house and set up as best as I could. Then I took some ofthe old canvases, took the primer paint, and painted over them. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal, because Wendy had mentioned I could do anything with the stuff in the barn.

I relaxed and turned on some eighties rock. I didn’t know what I was going to paint at first, and then the idea hit me. The falls. Luckily, I had some variations of blues and whites.

I started with the falls in the corner and took time creating the mist that floated around them. I used different blues that I felt matched how it looked, including a deeper blue in the water below. Then I took time to paint the rocks red and add some greenery throughout the scene.

By the time I was done, I looked at the clock and saw that it was almost nine p.m. I’d painted for almost two hours, but I loved how the picture had turned out. I was never formally trained, but I knew my grandmother had painted. I remembered that when I was growing up, we’d had a lot of her paintings on our walls. Too bad my mother had been too drunk most of the time to care about things like art.

Irritation coursed through me. My mother.

I pushed that thought away and grabbed a few other wall hangings of various sizes. I primed all of them and let them dry. I figured I could put different sayings on them. Possibly my favorite scriptures. Then I took all the brushes to the sink and washed them out. I felt blessed to be here in Refuge Falls, to have sorted out some major things, and to have somebody by my side. I wondered what Damon was doing.

I got ready for bed and lay down, and then my phone buzzed. I grabbed it and saw it was a text from Damon.

Can you talk?

My heart skipped a beat as I entered the call. “Hello,” I said slowly.

He let out a light laugh. “Hello. I didn’t realize you had a radio DJ voice.”

I had to quietly laugh. “I feel like we’re teenagers.”

“All I could do was think about you today.”

Maybe it was stupid, but his admission felt like a big deal. “I may have thought of you a little bit.” I couldn’t help but smile because I liked to tease him.

“Oh, okay. Play it cool.”

I giggled.

“Did you just giggle?”

I giggled again. I turned on my side and kicked at the air, feeling so happy. “I guess I did.”

“It’s good to hear that.”

For a couple of seconds, we were quiet.

I asked, “So what do you do at the fancy police chief trainings?”

He let out a long sigh. “There is nothing fancy. It’s just hearing new policies for the state and different things we should implement into our station culture. Obviously, I wasn’t paying very good attention today. Though it is good to see friends from around the state and hear different things that might be working for them in their stations.”

I hadn’t thought that much about what went into his job. “You have a lot of responsibility. I bet that’s overwhelming sometimes.”

He sighed. “Actually, work has always been a constant. Ever since I graduated from the police academy and went to work being a police officer, it’s been constant. And then two years ago I became police chief. It was kind of crazy, because it was about the same time Missy left me. Yet it was the thing that kept me grounded. That and my children, of course.”