Goodbye Does Not Mean What You Think It Means

This post is the continuation of a fiction series. Andra is reworking a discarded chapter from her existing WIP manuscript and sharing it in pieces here. If you missed the first two installments, read Two Essays. One Post. New Series. before reading this post. Come back next Monday for another installment.

Richard screwed Jewel like a longhorn bull mounts a female, always wary of her matching horns. Maybe that’s why he left the next morning without saying goodbye.

Jewel didn’t wait a week. She tracked him to his mama’s house in western Virginia. Oh, she didn’t follow him. How desperate and unladylike and sad, totally unbefitting a beauty queen.

No, she used her connections at the local telephone company to find out his parents’ telephone number. An address came along with it. She wrote to that address telling Richard she loved him, she’d never met anyone like him, she’d do anything to have him between her legs again, she’d move anywhere to be with him. He was exquisite and refined and oh so sexy, and she missed him.

Richard had the audacity to wait a whole month to reply. That’s when Jewel should’ve said goodbye to the whole business.

Two months later, they married in a small Texas ceremony. Two witnesses. They were late to their own wedding because they had sex in the car en route and hoped neither the preacher nor the witnesses could smell it as they reverently stated their vows.

Twenty-six years later, Jewel studies her reflection in the rearview mirror. Her face is a bit fuller, but it softens her edges in all the right places. No double chin sliding down her neck because she always sleeps on her back without a pillow. Skin still flawless.

No one suspects Jewel is a decade older than most mothers at Glory Evangelical Church. It’s not her fault most women try too hard to prove they are good mothers and wind up with baggy, haggard eyes, swollen over themselves from lack of sleep. “Johnny, don’t do that. No, Johnny, you shouldn’t touch that. Johnny, when I say no, I mean no.” Over and over, ten thousand times a day. Every day. For at least a decade. Maybe two. Exhausting. Of course, boys DO matter more in the eyes of God, so maybe they are worth the effort. Since Jewel only has a daughter, she does not know.

And Jewel refuses to do that old stuff for her daughter. She won’t ever let a girl-child make her matronly.

Still, she’s always known how to control Susan, at least until now. She blames Richard for their daughter’s every weakness. He’s the one who left her, alone and seven months pregnant in New Orleans, to watch the Sugar Bowl with her sister Irene. If he had controlled his football addiction, she might have stayed home that night, and who knows where they might be today?

Jewel twirls a curl around a finger and eases into another intersection. “He’s been paying ever since, but I predict today’ll be the turd juice on top of his ice cream sundae.”

Poor little Susan’s destiny was set the night Richard knocked on the bathroom door at her sister’s. “Jewel? You okay in there?” 

She stopped breathing to fool him into thinking she might be dead. Wouldn’t he be sorry for doing this to her? But dear Richard was always a bit lacking in the attentiveness department. He refused to read her mind. Instead, he rapped obliviousness even louder and called, “Can I get you anything?”

Yes. An illegal abortion. Some desperate woman to adopt this child. A team of professionals to whip her into the slender beauty she’ll never be again.

Jewel leaned over the sink, splashed her face with cold water, and barked, “I’m fine.”

Seconds trickled past, water dripping from the faucet. Richard cleared his throat. She can still picture him beyond the solid wood of the bathroom door, shuffling his feet and rubbing the back of his neck and looking heavenward, like God would tell him what to do to make his wife happy.

Some requests God can’t grant, not even after a lifetime of begging.

TO BE CONTINUED………

To see what else Andra has been writing in series fiction, visit The Aftermath of Death, She Was Venus in Fur, Grief Out of Balance, For the Love of a Gun, Death by Toilet, Biscuits, Gardenias and a Funeral and Everything Dies. She’s also on Medium with a new story HERE.