Rock Hard Neighbor

My grandmother must’ve laid this stuff out for me before she had gone into the nursing home.

My favorite stuffed doll was there, with red string for hair and freckles on her cheeks. There was a jewelry box with all of my grandmother’s jewelry and a china set that looked like it would shatter if I chanced to touch it. There was a vase lying on its side, and within it was something silken that was wrapped up into a tight tube-like shape.

My grandmother had taken great care to set it out for me, but I wasn’t ready to go through it just yet.

I left the unopened note on the bed before I shut the window. I made my way downstairs, careful to avoid the gaping hole where I’d fallen through. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see through my tears or feel anything but the slamming of my heart within my chest. I stumbled out onto my porch and fell to my knees, sobbing into my hands as the cold night air enveloped my body.

I was crying so hard I didn’t even hear Brian’s truck pull up beside my cabin.

“Come here,” he said. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

“She’s dead,” I said, sobbing. “She’s really really gone.”

“I know baby,” Brian said. “I’m so sorry, Amanda.”

“You don’t get it,” I said. “She raised me.”

“I understand the pain you’re going through,” he said.

“No!” I exclaimed as I ripped myself from him. “No, you don’t.”

He stared down at me with his piercing gaze as I wrapped my arms around my body.

“Where’s Lanie?” I asked.

“In the truck,” he said.

“Good. Because we need to talk.”

“Amanda. Why don’t you come with us to the cabin? I can lay Lanie down to sleep, then we can talk on my couch,” he said.

“I don’t know. I only feel like crying.”

“Amanda,” he said.

I fluttered my watery gaze up to him as he sighed heavily.

“Just come back with us,” Brian said.

I grabbed my things and hopped silently into his truck. Lanie was already asleep in her car seat, which made putting her to bed easy for Brian. I sat on his couch, staring at the empty fireplace.

I must’ve zoned out because when I came to, Brian was next to me and there was a roaring fire warming my body.

“My mother was a drug addict and an alcoholic,” I said.

I felt Brian reach over and wrap my hand up within his.

“She wasn’t always that way, but when she caught my father cheating on her with her best friend, she fell into using to cope. She’d drop me off with my grandmother on the weekends so she could go party, but soon she couldn’t hold a job. We were bouncing around town, living with her bullshit friends and sleeping on couches. I called my grandmother one night when things got too rowdy, and she came and got me. I stayed with my grandmother more than I did my own mother, and soon my grandmother filed for custody of me.”

I felt Brian grip my hand tightly as tears rose to my eyes again.

“I watched how taxing it was for my grandmother to fight my mother for custody. How she had to fight her own daughter. All the proof she had to bring to the table and how much money she had to shell out for a private investigator. It beat her down, emotionally and mentally. These types of fights, they bring out the worst in people. My mother tried to paint my grandmother as an old, decrepit, useless woman who didn’t have the funds or the energy to keep up with a child. My grandmother was just trying to prove to the court that I was financially dependent on her and not my mother. It was hell, Brian. And it’s a hell I’m not willing to let Lanie live.”

“That’s why you’re so willing to help,” he said.

“Yeah. It changed me. Watching all of that changed me, and not for the better. I was angry as a teenager, and art was my outlet. It’s why I was so angry at Daryl all the time for calling my passion idiotic and silly. Because art literally saved me from my mother’s same wasted path.”

“He’s an asshole. You know that, right?” Brian asked.

“I do. I dated him in college because he was the first guy that had ever been interested in me. It was new and exciting, so I shrugged off his comments just to experience what it meant to be liked by a guy. But I found my confidence through my art and wasn’t willing to put up with his shit anymore. He wouldn’t support my dreams, and he tried to turn me into someone I wasn’t.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you who are. Lanie and I happen to think you’re pretty great,” he said.

I smiled at him through my tears. “My interview didn’t go quite as planned.”