When One Door Closes - Second Edition

So I wrote the correct ending for this story. The first one was wishful thinking and a cop-out because I was getting sick. Yeah, that's my excuse and I am sticking with it. I hope you like this ending better. I know it's too late for the Trifecta contest but I needed to fix it. It is exactly 333 words long.

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She went home with tears in her eyes, unshed as yet, locked behind the shock of the moment. She had no idea how he would react. They’d never be able to pay their bills with both of them on unemployment. She just knew they’d lose the house. Who was going to hire people in their mid-fifties? How did a person go on after working for the same company for fifteen years?

She opened the front door and their gazes met.

“I got laid-off today.”

“You’re fuckin’ kidding me.”

“No.”

He started laughing. She began to cry.

“It’s not funny!”

He held his stomach.

“You’re right,” he said. “You don’t know it, but we’re lucky this happened.”

She sniffed and took a breath.

“I think you’ve finally lost it. We’re going to lose everything we have.”

“Who cares? Let them have it all.” He waved his arms like a game show model. “We are free.”

“If you call living in our car freedom.”

He rose from his chair, danced over to her and grabbed her in a bear hug. She pushed on his chest.

“Let me go, you mad man.”

“Never.” He kissed her. “Come on.” He took her hand and pulled her towards the door. “I thought about going to kidnap your from work. That would have been romantic.” He tugged her onto the porch. He pointed at the bags she had missed on the way in.

“Are you leaving me?”

He hugged her more tightly.

“We always talked about just getting in the car and running away to see the country.”

He wiped the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs. She looked at the bags again and saw her green ones next to his black ones. She looked at his face. Really looked at his face. The frown lines were gone from his forehead. The worrying lines between his brows were erased. His smile lit up his eyes.

Her chest hurt.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

She took a deep breath.

Tears and Fears

* comments closed on this post *

I cried last night.

The MM wouldn’t fall asleep at one when he should have taken his nap My fault. I should have fed him before putting him down so he was too hungry to calm and I didn’t figure it out until a couple of hours later when he told me he was hungry. I let him up at two thirty. He ate a whole can of Spagetti-O’s which he loves for lunch, plus a whole banana. Then we went to Target because I was out of bubble bath and he wanted a bath yesterday. Our Target is only three miles away. On that short car ride, The MM got sleepy. I put him in the cart and we went in the store. He stayed awake long enough to pick out Mr. Bubble, and blue and pink bath foam and the bath water coloring tablets and an Angry Birds gift bag coloring kit. Then he started nodding off I the cart while I tried to look for closet organizing baskets. I figured I could do that when I was alone next week much better, so we went home like he wanted.

As soon as I put him in the car, he fell asleep. He stayed asleep while I took him out of the car. I figured I would let him sleep an hour then wake him up. By the time the hour went by it was five in the evening. He wouldn’t wake up. I even moved him from the couch to his bed and he wouldn’t wake up. I knew I was going to be in trouble now. He did get out of bed to find me around seven. He climbed on me and went back to sleep. QV picked him up and carried him back to bed. We hoped he would sleep all night long now. I didn’t think it would happen, so I went to bed at seven thirty (I did get up early - at six - which I am no longer used to after only two weeks.) The MM woke up at nine thirty and stayed awake, playing, until two thirty in the morning. It’s eight now and he’s still asleep. We’re going to visit my parents, O & O, today. Hopefully, I’ll do better with The MM schedule.

I cried last night not because my sleep was disturbed although that never makes me happy. Because I couldn’t fall right to sleep and stay asleep, I started thinking. I thought about work. It seemed like it was so long ago that I worked and I sort of miss not having a place to go to each day - you know, like an easy plan for my days. And I miss the familiarity of the people and that they’ve mostly made no effort to contact me. First I tried to block the bad feelings and then I remembered that I’m not doing that anymore. I am now looking at my bad thoughts and feelings and examining them instead of running from them. So I cried.

And right then I got the opening for my book, tSLBoM, and how it should be written. The plan and layout came to me in the middle of my tears and fears. Not a bad trade off.

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* forgot to turn off comments - I wonder if that was Freudian *