A Breath Until Forever (25 page)

Meredith passed another car a grape colored 1964 Pontiac GTO, and selectively pulled around it. It had been going too slow, at a speed of 40 miles per hour in a 50 mph zone. She thought was odd, since it had a powerful 325 horse power engine, with a light body, and could outperform any other car out on the road. Why some people don't take advantage of their fast cars sometimes, she didn't know.

They finally reached town where the I90W met the 59. He needed to be dropped off at the Capital Diner where a man who bought land to turn them into shopping plazas and malls was waiting for him to talk about the future of the ranch. He may have an offer for him that he couldn't refuse. Talking to this man was Joshua's last resort, but after evaluated all of his bills, he felt that he had no other choice than to consider all offers put out on the table.  He was close to $100,00 in debt, and each day brought more financial woes and worries.

Meredith pulled up. Joshua got out of the Jeep then closed the door. He was crying again as he couldn't help it. Meredith soon followed her tears flowing more heavy then it did before. This time it was for real. He was really leaving her. And she was leaving him. And there was no going back. He just stood there for quite some time, not wanting to go. It was almost as if he was paralyzed, that something was holding him back his physical body's last attempt at trying to talk some sense to himself to make his mind understand that he can't give up so soon. They really didn’t have to say anything. Goodbyes had already been said. It had been a long hard goodbye one that both didn't want to do but knew that they had to. They were two grown adults, who had other things to do, responsibilities, besides making love in the violet filled fields, and sharing their morning coffee's in the afternoon all the while singing songs songs from the Carpenters. They just looked at each other, blankly, with undying stares that seem to be longing for each other in their lost dreams. She was a kept married woman, a mother, a painter who knew she had other journeys to live which didn't require Joshua Aspen, a machine operator, a recovering drug addict and alcoholic who made Meredith out to be his hero, making her into the very last person he would ever love, and trust. And so with that he turned around, and walked away from Meredith.

She put the Jeep into first gear, then stepped hard on the gas pedal, loose gravel kicking up behind the ruthless tires. He continued walking towards the diner, watching as a few lovebirds enjoyed a big meal and a coffee. He looked back once and noticed she had already gone, fast and swift and now could only see the backs of her taillights as she made her way back towards Highway 86 so that she could connect to Highway 60. He was crying again and the tears overwhelmed him with sadness. She had been watching him out of her rear view mirror until he became smaller and smaller and started to cry again when he became nothing bigger then a speck. North Carolinian dust ejected from out from the beneath the truck in a veil to obscure whatever was left of Joshua Aspen. She grinded her gears and cranked the truck from 2
nd
to 3rd to 4
th
where she was now speeding at a mighty 55 mph wild and reckless along the highway that had once many months ago had brought her to him. It was a surreal moment and she felt overwhelmed by such and she had to gasp for air. Was this really happening? Was Joshua Aspen really gone? She had everything to gain and all there was to lose if she stayed.

She continued to drive until she saw a gas station only a few yards away. She stopped there, nervously, as she needed to make a very important call. She went to the telephone booth to call her husband Benjamin and see how he had been making out without her. While speaking to him, she noticed the view of the diner, but some idiot was blocking her view of seeing where the diner was. She wanted to see him one last time, even if that meant from a distance, and from a view that God would have seen, by looking down on him. But unable to do so, made the reality of him being gone hit hard and even though she was still on the phone with Benjamin, Benjamin who hadn't given her a word in edgewise she let go of the phone and slinked down in to the phone booth, her hands shaking, mad tears running down her face. What had she done? Had she done the right thing? She curled up in a frightful ball of nerves, her knees close up to her chest, her head lowered and down against her knees, still hearing the voice of Benjamin speaking through the other end, and looked out over the town who had not only changed herself and how she viewed the world, but her heart.

It started to rain. The phone booth fogged up. The rain couldn't compare to the tears that Meredith now cried. There were too many, too fast, and she drowned herself in her sorrow.

Meredith drove back. She drove straight through the rain, the thunder, the storms, only stopping occasionally for a coffee, a bite to eat, and a few hours of sleep. She wanted to get home as quickly as she could. She ran as fast as she could in her 1959 Jeep, the speedometer sometimes racing towards 90 mph, watching as telephone poles whizzed past her and cactus and towns were nothing but blurs of lost perception. She was hurt. Angry. Confused. She ran away from a man named Joshua Aspen from Thunder Valley, North Carolina in hopes that the faster she ran, the more he would become out of view.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Meredith was on the phone when Benjamin arrived back proud to deliver the news that Daniel received a scholarship to the University of California in Berkeley. Benjamin wanted to celebrate. Meredith hung up the phone. She had been talking to her mother who lived in Sedona, Arizona who had just told her that the cancer was back and that she didn't have too much longer before her time was up. Meredith already cried preliminary tears, knowing that her mom hadn't much longer to live, but this was the confirmation phone call to verity it. But she couldn't share it with Benjamin. Benjamin never cared for her mother, so it was best to keep the news exclusively to herself. Another secret she had to keep from him.

She had a whole spectrum of secrets she kept from Benjamin. She often thought if it was what husband and wives do, especially when they were not really in love. She knew that was what this husband and wife did. Keep secrets, and she had the biggest secret of all. That she had cheated for the first time in their marriage with a young, hot rancher who not only put her heart back together after it had been shattered into a tiny million pieces, but had been a guiding light of love and inspiration. Benjamin wanted to go into town to celebrate Daniel’s scholarship win, but Meredith not in the mood to even celebrate her sons scholarly victory wanted to stay behind. She didn't know that Daniel had even applied to the University of California. What a small world, thought Meredith, reflecting on the fact that Joshua Aspen, had too, studied their.  So Benjamin, angry stayed behind and gave Daniel the keys to the BMW something he rarely did.

“You go into town and hang out with your friends, perhaps even pick up a special girlfriend.” Benjamin told Daniel.

Meredith crossed over angry look at Benjamin when he did this. Daniel was 17 years old much too young to be going out with cute girls and carrying out alone. He was to focus on his studies and not get married at a young age like his father and her did. She didn't want him to make a big mistake like they had. Life was too short, to be married with kids, feeling stuck and feeling that there is so much more out there in the world but you can't grab it and take because of those things called your damn responsibilities. No, no no! But Meredith as too tired to fight anymore. Too exhausted to argue with Benjamin and too plain shattered to have this big worldly talk with Daniel to convince him that girls, although they looked pretty with their long flowing hair and their pretty eyes and their shapely figures were a forbidden fruit he shouldn't take a bite out of until he was settled and ready to be able to have a family. Or at least until he knew without a doubt that he was absolutely totally and in crazy love. She wanted so much to scream at Daniel to shake some sense into hi, but she let him go watching as Daniel happily got behind the wheel of the newly shined up luxury car powered up it's engines and drove out in to the streets where he would soon connect with the city and all those pretty girls with those pretty smiles and those names that he wouldn't remember a few years down the road.

Meredith grabbed a large cup of coffee from the kitchen, then went outside on the veranda where she sat down at the small iron bistro table simply shaded by large, oversized spider plants and looked out in to the view of Seattle where all she could see was concrete and tall insubstantial buildings and tar and pavement. There were no hearty oak trees and no wild field of violets, or no wide theaters of sunshine  like she would see in from North Carolina. She missed Thunder Valley, North Carolina. But she missed Joshua Aspen, even more, wondering what he was doing right now, and wondering if he was missing her just the same.

It was now nearly 2 pm in the afternoon and the sun had risen to its highest height, and she felt a heat warm up her shoulders. It was no North Carolinian sun though, where it was always angry and full of spit, an ireful storm, scorching her skin to blister and sweat and was so hot that it melted the sky.

Benjamin joined Meredith at the table, sitting down from across her. He also had grabbed himself a quick cup of coffee and sat down, left leg crossed over, the right. He wore a crisp white shirt with a pair of neat indigo blue bell bottom jeans. A gold necklace circled short around his neck. He was wearing a pair of thin steel rimmed glasses and he had his hair cut a little shorter than usual. Meredith took a good look at him, scoping him with her amber eyes and though hat he had aged a little more since the last time she had seen him, which was three months ago. Salted white hairs threaded throughout his hair, and short flickering wrinkles danced around his examining Irish green eyes. He had grown a goatee, a soul patch that was thick and full of girth. She hated facial beards. But she wasn't going to tell him that.

He studied Meredith for a moment, and thought that she; too had changed. But not in a bad way. Rather a very good way. Her hair had grown a little longer, and because of all the sun, it was highlighted now a golden wheat color. Her skin, had tanned into a nice golden bronze, and made her glow radiantly. She wore a short skirt, and he noticed that her legs were a little leaner, trimmer, coiled muscles forming a beautiful incline. All that hiking had been good to her body, and she left the sate a new woman with not only a new view of the world but ta new body to match her new spirit and mind. North Carolina had been good to her, he thought to himself. He wanted to make love to his wife right then just by her new found beauty that she had magically gone back at least 10 years and that she was a golden girl in his eyes however she was still same old Meredith and so his brain took over his sight and made him come back down to reality. He loved his wife, but not in the way that a husband should .It took one year of marriage to have come to that. It was now more of fa friendship love and when he touched her he didn't feel fire- or heat; rather he felt a stiff coldness, an awkwardness that one feels if touching a sibling in a romantic way, or a friend. But he still loved her – there was no doubt about that. But it was just a different kind of love. A different level. A degree or step down. And he didn't know how to get to the height of love that Meredith always wanted to be, nor did he think he was ever capable of it. The height of love that Meredith wanted, soared above clouds, and he didn't like to fly.

“I'm really glad your home Meredith.” Benjamin said. He opened up a newspaper. Eye contact ceased to exist.

“Supposed to rain tomorrow.” Benjamin said, reverberating the weather in the news. “It rains every day.” Meredith wanted to say, but she didn't. Rather, she kept quiet and perfectly still. She didn't feel like talking any further about the weather. It would only make her feel more lonely and depressed than she already was.

He flipped a page on the newspaper. Crossed his leg over the other side.

“So,” He drawled out, sip of coffee. “It rains every day here. It's Seattle.” He took another sip. The sound of his slurping nauseating her. “Happy to be home?”

Meredith couldn't answer at first. A lump formed in her throat. “Yeah, sure.” She was lying. She wasn't happy to be home. Sure, she had missed her son, but she hadn't missed actually being home. Or Benjamin. Or Seattle. If there was a genie and she had been granted one wish, she would have wanted to back to Joshua to North Carolina and Thunder Valley Ranch that's where she belonged .That's where her heart was. Even though she left, her heart stayed back there.

“How have you been?”  She asked Benjamin.

“Good, keeping busy, you know with the law firm. I may have gotten that big case. You know, the one in the newspapers. About the boy murdering his mother.”

Meredith cringed. She hated reading the newspaper. It always brought bad news. This was one good example. “Well, that's good, right/”

“Yup.” He said. He put the newspaper down. “It will pay some old bills, and some of the overhead on Daniels' college. The scholarship isn't going to pay for all of it, including his living expenses.”