8 days to Maggie’s wedding . . .
Rose Howell stared out the car windshield at the two-story clapboard house painted in three different shades of beige. Cheerful flowering bushes lined the path to the porch and front door. The house she grew up in. It looked plain. Ordinary. Nothing special. A family’s house. The picture of normal. No one outside those walls knew the secrets this house held. How those four walls and a roof made a house, but not a home.
Outside was the image of middle-class success.
Inside, a nightmare played out of a family ruined by alcoholism, anger, abuse, unfulfilled dreams and promises, and a gnawing desire to escape even though you had nowhere to go.
Trapped in that house as a child, Rose had felt the walls closing in, but the windows had given her a glimpse of the outside world that seemed vast and peaceful. The tension had suffocated her. And her father’s presence loomed large and scary, a threat waiting to happen.
Rose escaped this particular circle of hell on earth by taking the one opportunity she had worked hard for because it offered her a better life. College.
Her father drilled into her that the only way to succeed was to be better than everyone else. As a child, that meant getting the best grades in school. She did so easily. School was never that hard for her. It was a sanctuary even in the worst of times, though school could be its own social challenge. She graduated third in her class.
Most parents would have been ecstatic. Not her father. She wasn’t number one. In his eyes, she’d failed miserably.
Strange he thought so, since he hadn’t even graduated in the top ten percent of his class.
Her mom revealed that little secret to cheer her up after a particularly blistering setdown by her dad for the B+ she received on an AP geometry test.
Logic didn’t often play into his outbursts and demands for his daughters.
He wanted Rose and her younger sister, Poppy, to be the best at everything, so they wouldn’t be held back the way her father seemed to believe everyone held him back from achieving greatness.
He didn’t get the promotion because someone less productive, less deserving, somehow stole it from him. The boss had it in for him. Someone didn’t like him. They never gave him credit for all his hard work. They didn’t see his potential.
At first as a young girl, she’d thought it terribly unfair that people treated her father so badly. As she got older, she realized the truth. He hadn’t been overlooked or underestimated. He’d simply expected to be given what he thought he deserved even if he hadn’t earned it.
But the hardest thing to accept and understand was that nothing she did would ever be good enough. She’d never win his approval or praise.
She left for college with one intent in mind. To never go home again. To build a life free of her father, this place, and its dark memories.
She’d been gone eight years.
Not nearly long enough to forget.
She stared at the house, her roiling emotions a swirl of anger, resentment, hate, and deep sadness.
I will never forget.
But she’d learned to live with the baggage tainting her new experiences and the growth she’d achieved both personally and professionally.
She lived the life she’d always wanted now. She had friends, a good job, and her own cute apartment. She’d even learned to stop looking at all men and seeing her father. She had stopped thinking that everything they said was some kind of backhanded compliment. Maybe she didn’t wholly trust men, but she didn’t outright dismiss them anymore. Still, she’d never felt loved, never been in love.
Did love even exist? She often wondered about that.
Rose had been sitting in her car outside the house for twenty minutes, unable to force herself to go in. She didn’t want to be confronted with all those twisted memories of when her father had made his issues their problem.
It had taken her a long time to come to the conclusion that her father was a sad man, doomed to failure and loss by his own words and actions. He would never be happy or feel loved or succeed in anything. He probably would have died alone and miserable had he not fallen down the stairs drunk and broken his neck three years ago.
The twisted son of a bitch died a far better death than he deserved.
She hadn’t mourned the loss of the man who brought her nothing but pain. She swore he liked it, hurting them and putting her, Mom, and Poppy down all the time.
She didn’t even attend the funeral.
And now, Rose had come home at last, for her best friend Maggie’s wedding. She also wanted to use this week to reconnect with her mother and sister, hoping they could finally put the past behind them and start fresh. And she hadn’t seen Maggie in a while, either.
She
had a week to make up for lost time with her best friend and her family.
Was that enough time to bury the past? Maybe not. But she hoped to tear down the walls she’d erected around her heart where her mom and sister were concerned.
She’d reached out to Poppy over the years and gotten nothing but scathing rejections. Poppy hated Rose for leaving her behind and blamed Rose for their father’s cruelty.
The guilt weighed on Rose. The deep and heavy ache she carried never waned.
She wished she’d been stronger. She wished she’d known what to say to Poppy to make her leave and come to Rose.
She wished for a lot of things to be different.
Telling herself she’d done the best she could under the circumstances didn’t help.
She didn’t want to be there at all, but she’d promised Maggie a kickass bachelorette party and to be the best maid of honor any bride could want this week. She promised her best friend they’d spend as much time together as possible to close the gap that had been widening in their relationship because of work and life.
It was inevitable things would change as they got older and reached new milestones, like Maggie getting married while Rose remained single, but they’d vowed to always be best friends.
Rose would forever be family to the two people, almost strangers now, still living inside that house, but she didn’t know if they’d still be in her life if they hadn’t been connected by blood.
But she’d promised herself she would try one more time to overcome the past and find a way to reconnect with her mom and Poppy, because she missed them.
She took a deep breath, grabbed her purse off the seat beside her, and got out of the car. She took her suitcase from the back seat, walked the path up to the porch, and knocked on the door. It opened to her past and an onslaught of memories as the familiar sights and smells hit her. Lemon oil on the same old wood furniture along with the lavender Mom clipped from the garden, put into small vases, and placed on the dining room table and on the mantel in the living room.
The second she looked into her mother’s eyes for the first time in years, she knew everything was the same but also completely different. Because Rose was not the kid who’d left, but the woman she’d become away from this place and the parents who’d tried to ruin her.
She set her shoulders and held her head high. “Hi, Mom. It’s been a long time.”
Her mom pressed her lips tight. “You shouldn’t have come back here.”
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