Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 65042 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65042 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
No one needed me and no one wanted me. I had nothing but an empty house to go back to—a house I was soon going to lose because I didn’t have the money to pay the mortgage.
I had never felt so alone in my life.
I had no idea that things were about to change dramatically…all because of those two keys.
2
DANNI
I stopped by a fast-food burger place on the way home and got myself a cheeseburger and fries and a chocolate shake. I’d been living on fast-food for a while and it showed. I’ve never been exactly skinny but at least when Craig was healthy I tried to watch my weight. But in the last three years, eating had been my only comfort. As we slid deeper and deeper into debt and my husband got sicker and sicker, I found myself “eating my feelings” more and more, until it became a habit. That was the reason most of my clothes were too tight.
Back home, I pushed aside the dusty knitting paraphernalia on the dining room table and opened my laptop. I used to love knitting—I even dreamed of opening my own little knitting shop one day. But that dream was long dead and I hadn’t picked up a pair of knitting needles in months—possibly years, though I used to make myself sweaters and scarves to wear during winter all the time.
Of course, we don’t get much winter where I live in Central Florida, but I could wear them for a month at least—usually in January. I was the only woman I knew who literally had a hand-knitted sweater for every day of the month. Not that it did me much good.
I scrolled through my laptop and looked over my sad excuse for a resume as I ate the tasteless, cardboard burger and soggy fries and sipped the watery shake. I sighed as I wondered who would want to hire a middle-aged, overweight woman with sad, tired eyes and no recent work experience. Nobody, that’s who.
I couldn’t believe I was going to have to start looking for employment but I knew if I didn’t find something fast, I really was going to be out on my ass. Since living in my car wasn’t very appealing, I’d better start looking.
Tomorrow, I told myself, yawning. I’ll start looking tomorrow. I just can’t face it tonight.
One thing nobody tells you about grief is how sleepy it makes you. Seriously, I’d been sleeping for ten and twelve hours a night since Craig’s funeral, and I found myself getting sleepy throughout the day, too. It was like my mind wanted to hide from reality and sleeping was the refuge it sought. In my dreams, my husband was still alive and healthy and I was young and happy again. When I woke up and remembered the reality of my sad, lonely life, all I wanted to do was go back to sleep.
Maybe I should just go to sleep and never wake up again.
I eyed the bottle of sleeping meds on my nightstand as I climbed into the big, empty bed I used to share with my late husband. A handful would probably do it. At the moment death felt easier than life.
I stared at the bottle for a long time before my eyelids got heavy. It wasn’t just that I missed my husband—I did, but Craig hadn’t been the man I married for years before he died. The cancer ate away at him until there was nothing left of the big, strong man I had said “I do” to in our early twenties. We hadn’t even had sex in the past three years—he was too sick and the chemo and other medications he took left him impotent.
But it wasn’t just grief that made me consider an overdose—it was the overwhelming struggle I knew was coming. Finding a job to keep the house, or if I couldn’t find one, living out of my car or maybe moving to a shelter. It sounded awful and I felt so tired. Too tired to struggle anymore. I felt like I’d been treading water for years, trying to keep from drowning. Now that Craig was gone, it seemed like my life was over and it would be easier to just let my head slip below the water.
With these dreary thoughts in my head, I finally drifted off.
I woke up at ten the next morning—only because the sunlight was shining in my eyes. I groaned and rolled over, pressing my face into the pillow as I remembered all over again that I was a widow now. A middle-aged, plus-sized widow with no family to turn to.
Craig and I hadn’t been able to have kids and we had talked about adopting…but then he got sick. As for the rest of my family, my father had died when I was only seven and my mom had moved us to another state when I was ten, so I never got to see my Grandma, who was his mother, again. She was dead too—I’d found that out when I moved away from home and tried to contact her.