Feels Like Falling - Kristy Woodson Harvey Page 0,4
either, but I’d kept myself up pretty good. And I figured I’d rather be alone than deal with his crap for the rest of my life. Thank the good Lord I’d had the sense not to marry the bastard. I took a long, slow drag of my Marlboro, feeling it calm my nerves even though the smoke made my throbbing tooth hurt worse. Where was I going to go? I didn’t have any family nearby. My girlfriends would take me in in a hot minute, but they’d warned me sideways and backward about Harry from the beginning, given me down the country about dating him. He was worthless. He was no good. I was too proud to admit they had been right.
I sighed and resolved to head to the shelter if I had to. Wouldn’t be the first night I’d spent there. Probably wouldn’t be the last. “One of us has to go to work!” I shouted through the glass, sounding less intimidating than I would’ve if my busted window had rolled down. But that ship had sailed around January. “Get out of my way, you moron. I swear to God, I’ll run over you. Don’t make me do it.”
I shifted the car into reverse, ignoring Harry’s muffled whines. The Impala was rattling and shaking, the air-conditioning blasting and the radio up. It seemed right fitting that “Goodbye to You” was playing as I backed out of the short dirt driveway of the tiny house Harry had inherited from his mother, where we’d been living for eight years. People were always asking why Harry and me didn’t make it official. Well, this was why.
He was all right. I mean, he was a nice guy deep down, the kind of guy who makes them weepy speeches about how beautiful you are and how he’s so lucky he’s got you and all that bull. But then you turn around and he’s lost his job again, and he got ahold of your savings and blew it at some blackjack table at some casino his friend swears he got rich at. The man just didn’t have any sense and that’s the God’s honest truth of it.
I was forty years old and starting over again. I briefly thought that maybe I should stick with Harry, that the devil I knew was better, that at least I wasn’t alone.
But then the tooth pain shot all the way through my ear and reminded me that it wasn’t me that should be feeling bad. If it weren’t for Harry, I’d be on my way to the dentist right now. If it weren’t for Harry, I wouldn’t be in all this pain because I wouldn’t be flat broke with nowhere to go, praying I could make it through the day at work.
* * *
“Morning, Mr. Joe,” I said as I walked through the back door of the fluorescent-lit local pharmacy for another long day on my feet in the photo lab. The job at Meds and More made me a living, yeah, but it sure wasn’t what I’d dreamed of back when I was a kid and my momma said that anybody named Diana’d grow up to be a princess.
“You all right there, D?” Mr. Joe asked. He was about the nicest manager you could ever hope to have. He was an inch shorter than me, kind of round, with a nice head of hair even though he was in his early fifties. The thing I liked best about him was that the blue shirts he wore tucked into his khaki pants were always pressed. Either he was good at ironing or he had some kind of generous girlfriend because I knew his wife had died a while back.
I nodded and tried to smile but ended up wincing instead. “My tooth is hurting something fierce again. I’d saved up all the money to get a root canal and whatnot, but that damn Harry found my stash and blew all my money in a poker tournament.”
Mr. Joe looked real nervous, and I said, “Now, don’t you worry. I’ll get me something back in the pharmacy to numb it up enough to get through the day.” And I’ll get a bottle from the ABC store to get me through the night, I thought.
“Now, Diana, I’m not gonna have any of my girls running around in pain all day. You get on to the dentist. I’ll cover photo until you get back.”