The Man She Married by Cathy Lamb

Author:Cathy Lamb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

PART III

Chapter 12

We were in an apartment. The house was gone. It was an earth-shaker for me. Once more my world had spun, tipped, and careened me off of it and into a wall. But this would be fine. I’d get used to it, I told myself. I would. Buck up, Natalie.

The kitchen was at least thirty years old, the gray Formica cracked, the white refrigerator dented, the windows not so clean, the beige carpets gross. We were also in a near-to-falling-apart neighborhood. A few blocks over, there was a gang problem.

There were four two-story apartment buildings that circled a courtyard. In each building there were four apartments. The apartments were all old, probably built in the 1950s. The courtyard had dead grass and a large concrete fountain, but the fountain had obviously been turned off for years. Maybe decades, judging by the weeds.

We were on the bottom floor. Zack had installed three locks on our door, and all of the windows had metal bars in the grooved area that could be locked for security.

In the first bedroom was our bed. I loved that bed. Zack bought it before we met. It was king-sized and took up most of the room. My clothes were in the bedroom closet, and he had his in the second bedroom. The second bedroom also held a bunch of our stuff, in boxes and bags, as if everything had been hastily packed, which it had, by Zack and his employees. More of our furniture was in Zack’s warehouse.

Our L-shaped blue couch took up much of the family room, on top of our blue and white rug. In front of the couch was our ottoman that my dad had made us out of wood from an old church in Lake Joseph that had blown down in a windstorm. Our white wood kitchen table was in the small kitchen nook with our white chairs. He had a vase of white daisies waiting for me.

Zack hadn’t decorated. I looked around. This was a place owned by a man who clearly had no time. Plus, Zack was not a decorator type. He left that to me.

I took a deep breath, standing in the middle of the family room after our mini-tour, Zack leaning a shoulder against a wall as if he was having a hard time standing up. We had fallen from one home to the next about as much as you can fall and still have indoor plumbing.

Everything was gone. My books; my grandma’s perfume bottles; my china teacups with the pink flowers; and my plants, pillows, and paintings by Grenadine Scotch Wild. Where was our Scrabble board? Where was our chess set? Where was my collection of white ceramic vases?

Then, remarkably, I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Maybe it was tinged with a bit of hysteria, of loss, of feeling I’d once again been flung off the planet.

But the truth is that nothing seems that bad after you’ve been in a coma. A coma where you’re alive

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