Page 9 of Codename: Dustoff
CHAPTERFIVE
Henry and Elyse honestly needed to slow their roll on their self-help kumbaya B.S. Between the accept and release mantra, the coping is moping, and this new pairs activity? Way too touchy feely for me. I’m not a touchy-feely person. I’m more accept it, deal with it, and move on.
Though that guy Emmett was a surprise. I guess he wasn’t the worst partner to have. Even if he did step into business that he wasn’t welcome inserting himself into. Like that whole fiasco with the chair. Speaking of that chair fiasco, I’d really done a number on my leg. Sometimes I was too damn stubborn for my own good.
The snow, coupled with the damp air, the over exertion and uncomfortable chairs all converged into waves of pain shooting all the way up my thigh. I silently prayed the roads would be clear all the way back to Haven’s Cove. I needed a pain pill and couldn’t take one while I drove.
What had been flurries this morning had morphed into big fat snowflakes, which increased with speed and intensity as I tried to make my way out of the city. My cell phone rang, immediately my head flashed to Emmett, and then had me rolling my eyes when I felt a pang of disappointment to see my sister’s face on the call screen.
“Annie, what’s up?”
“Dad says I have to give you my room!” She burst into tears. “Tell him Meelee. You said being home was just temporary. That you wouldn’t be staying long. So, then I shouldn’t have to give you my room!”
I could hear my dad in the background, cajoling her. He tried to appeal to her empathy, telling her the stairs were too narrow and hard for me to navigate. She just kept crying into the phone telling me that her room was hers. Honestly, I don’t even understand how Annie somehow finagled my parents into giving up the sitting room on the first floor to accommodate her. With eight of us in the family and a fairly small three-bedroom house, we’d all had to share our rooms with other siblings. Now that it was just her, my two younger brothers, Abraham and Abdieso, and our sister Abigail, sharing should have been a piece of cake. Arlan, my oldest brother, Aaron, and Alana were either married with kids, or serving in the military. And then there was me. In the in-between of military servitude and trying to figure out the rest of my life. I’d come home from New York. There was no point in being close to the base anymore since I was a medical discharge. I needed to find a path. Given I still had a hard time coping, trying to figure out my life’s plan wasn’t the easiest either.
“Annie I’m trying to drive in the middle of a snowstorm. I need to focus on the road. Can we deal with this when I get home?”
“No!” she screeched into the phone, my whole stereo system vibrating with the sudden spike in volume, “Dad said I have to have the whole room cleaned out by the time you get home. Tell him Meelee, he’s right here. Tell him. If you’re going to be gone after the New Year, there’s no need for me to move in with Abby. Please. He’s right here.”
I didn’t even have a chance to tell her to put him on. His baritone voice, still tinged with hints of our Guatemalan roots, echoed through my tiny car.
“Mija, don’t fret over this. She’s young. You know how it is.”
“Dad, just let her keep her room. I’m fine bunking with Abby.”
“Absolutely not. She doesn’t even understand the sacrifices that you’ve had to make and the trials you’ve endured. Her giving up her room pales in comparison. And I won’t have my injured daughter struggling to get up a steep and narrow set of stairs every single day, because your mom has allowed Annie too long of a leash.”
There it was again—that damn talk of sacrifice and endurance. From my own family even. I didn’t want to be accommodated out of some guilt laden sense of duty. In my head at that very moment, a pair of green eyes, attached to a mouth made for sinning, and sandy brown hair surfaced in my brain and said check.
“I’m driving right now.” I could still see Emmett in my head, and he raised his eyebrow at me in challenge. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do for me. But it isn’t worth giving yourself high blood pressure over. We can talk about it when I get home.”
“Okay, mija. You focus on the road and drive safe.”
I looked down to hang up the call, and then my little car slid into chaos.