All for Maddie

by Jettie Woodruff

  “Sure,” Aaron smiled as I followed Kylie to the most magnificent master suite I have ever seen in my life. I’d never beheld so much elegancy in all my life.

  “Holy shit, Ky. This room is crazy.”

  “I know, right? Wait till you see the bathroom.”

  I couldn’t wait. I had to see right that second. I didn’t understand. How in the hell did two people fresh out of school afford something like that. It was beyond belief. The Jacuzzi tub was bigger than my entire bathroom. Maddie would have a hay day in that thing. I knew Kylie had just landed a job with an advertising company and Aaron was going to work at the law firm with his dad, but still. I had a hard time paying my electric bill. I hated to think what kind of house payment that place held.

  “Look!” Kylie called, holding up the slinkiest red dress possible.

  “I can’t wear that,” I demanded, seeing the sexy, short, club dress.

  “Oh yes you can, and these,” she said, holding up the black stilettos that I was sure to break my neck in.

  “Where the hell are you taking me?”

  “To a male review,” she smiled.

  “You’re joking.”

  “Nope, we have a private room reserved, just for us girls with six entertaining men, walking around in speedos, and serving us drinks.”

  “And Aaron’s okay with that?”

  “Aaron will be attending his own party,” she said with that look, implying that he too would be entertained for the last time by beautiful women.

  Aaron took us out to a fancy restaurant for supper where I met his parents, some of Kylie’s friends, and a couple of Aaron’s. I was so happy that Kylie was the same size as me. I would have stuck out like a banana in a red apple bowl.

  I didn’t feel out of place or beneath the group at all. They all made me feel very welcomed, and one of Aaron’s friends, Barry, hit on me the whole night. I didn’t mind. He was hot. Hot as hell. Maybe this trip wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Maybe it was.

  “Whitley, show Aaron’s mom a picture of Maddie,” Kylie urged.

  I took out my phone and slid my thumb across the screen at the multitude of pictures of my little Maddie. I suddenly missed her and wondered if she was asleep yet. It wasn’t quite nine so it was a tossup. It really depended on whether or not my dad made her nap.

  “How old is she?” Aaron’s mother asked.

  “She’ll be three next month,” I proudly said, looking at her silly little smile.

  “You don’t look old enough to have a 3 year old. You must have been pretty young.”

  “I had her when I was 18,” I admitted.

  I noticed very quickly, that Barry was no longer interested in me. I was okay with that too. I already had one guy that couldn’t accept Maddie. I didn’t need another one. I excused myself and went to the bathroom to try and catch her still awake.

  “Hey, thought you were going to call me and let me know you made it okay,” my dad chastised.

  “I did, I talked to Dana. You were outside with Maddie.”

  “Oh, everything go okay? No problems with the truck?”

  “No, she ran like a gem. Is Maddie asleep yet?”

  “No, she’s eating ice cream. Maddie, your momma wants to talk to you!” he called.

  “I eat ice cream,” she said in the phone.

  “I bet you are eating chocolate, right?”

  “No, I eat white wif chocolate all over da top. Papaw not wet me have gummy bears doe.”

  “I don’t have any gummy bears. Papaw will buy you some tomorrow,” I heard my dad say.

  “Did you go see Rusty?”

  “Uh-huh, and a doctor was der and gived him a shot.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah, I have a eat my ice cream now, it gonna melt.”

  “Okay, I love you, baby.”

  “She’s gone,” my dad said, replacing busy Maddie.

  I laughed. “Okay, give her a kiss for me.”

  “Okay, you be safe out there. You hear.”

  “I will, Dad. I’ll talk to you, tomorrow.”

  Chapter 2

  Kylie was right, the guys walking around half-naked were outrageous. There were a total of nine girls from the wedding party. We, honest to God, all wore the exact same dress with nine different colors. I didn’t believe Kylie when she had first told me that we were all wearing the same dress. I thought for sure some of them would be different in some sort of fashion. They weren’t and there truly were nine different colors anything from my red to Emily’s hot pink and of course Kylie’s white. And if I do say so myself, we were some hot looking chicks.

  We stayed at the bar for a little more than three hours, until the women didn’t want to be with men they weren’t allowed to touch anymore. They wanted to go where the guys were. Kylie was no exception. She wanted to be where Aaron was, and so we did, piling into a minivan taxi, and meeting them in a neutral half way night club.

  The men too were dressed to kill. Who has a wedding party of nine? I of course would walk down the aisle with the best man, Barry, who wasn’t interested in me anymore after learning that I had a child. I didn’t care. I was having a blast with Kylie and my new girlfriends. They were crazy.

  The night club was packed. We sat right in the middle in a big round sofa type sitting area. I wondered how it just so happened to be empty for us, and then figured it out when I watched Aaron slip the manager a few bills.

  Kylie pulled all of us, guys too, to the dance floor when some upbeat bass song that I had never heard filled the surround sound. I was so out of the loop it wasn’t funny. Now, if they would have played the ABC song or the theme to Dora the Explorer, I could have been singing right along with them.

  Kylie’s very intoxicated friend, Wendy, moved in behind me, swaying her hips with mine, moving to the beat of the bass. It was great, as I was sure the hoots and whistles were for the two hot chicks grinding on the dance floor. Wendy and I raised our drinks and roared with them. That’s when I saw him. That’s when my world stopped. I was going to pass out, right there on the floor.

  “What’s wrong?” Wendy asked when I stopped, frozen in my tracks.

  “Nothing, I need to go to the bathroom,” I said, dismissing myself. Where was the restroom? Why did this place have to be so big?

  “Whit?” I heard Kylie say with a cautious tone.

  “Where’s the bathroom!” I yelled.

  She took my arm and led me through the crowd. “Are you sick?”

  “Yes,” I shouted. I was sick. I wasn’t lying. I opened the first stall and heaved, depositing not only the alcohol from my stomach, but almost four years’ worth of bottled secrets.

  Kylie handed me wet towels over the door. I opened the door and splashed cool water on my face. This couldn’t be happening. What was I supposed to do now?

  “I need to get out of here, Kylie,” I begged through the mirror.

  “Okay, we’ll go.”

  “I don’t want to ruin your night. We were planning on staying out all night. Just give me a key to the house and I’ll get a cab.”

  “I am not going to let my bestie take off in a cab without me. It’s fine. We’ll leave.”

  “Kylie, it would make me feel better if you stayed. This is your party. This is your night, and I can tell that you’re not ready to go. I don’t want you to leave on my account.”

  “But, I would feel horrible, Whit.”

  “Don’t. It’s not your fault I don’t get out much and can’t hold my liquor.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to stay. I just saw Alex Wesson; maybe you two could hookup or something.”

  I was sick again. Just hearing the name sent me back into the stall, heaving.

  “Okay, okay, you better go. I’ll call you a cab. Are you sure it’s okay if we stay?”

  “Positive,” I said, wiping my mouth again. I needed to get out of there. Once this wedding was over, I was never coming back to Lincoln, Nebraska…ever. If Kylie wanted to see me, Kylie would have
to come to me.

  I stood on the sidewalk needing air as I waited for the cab.

  “Whitley?” I heard the familiar voice.

  God, no. Please, I begged. How was I supposed to face him? I turned toward Alex and was unexpectedly not the shy little seventeen year old anymore. A surge of anger came from deep within. I looked over at him with a look of pure hatred and disgust.

  “Are you kidding me right now? Do you honestly think you have a right to just come up to me and talk to me after what you did?”

  “What I did?”

  I had never hit anyone in my life. Was he really going to stand there and deny it? I decked him as hard as I could, hard enough to cause me to grab my own hand as he clutched his jaw.

  “Whitley, please listen to me. I’m sorry, I’m sorry about that night. It has haunted me for years. I’m not that guy. I don’t know why I did that.”

  “It’s haunted you!” I screamed. People were watching. I didn’t care. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Poor fucking bastard. “You don’t know shit about haunting. You got to finish high school without being that girl. You got to go hang out with your friends. You got to go to parties and be young.” Shut the hell up, Whitley, I tried telling myself. I couldn’t. “You got to run off to college. Don’t you fucking tell me how that night has haunted you,” I screamed, pulling down on my too short dress.

  “What on earth are you talking about, Whitley?” Alex asked with a stone cold look.

  “Nothing, stay away from me,” I demanded.

  “Alex? What’s going on? What are you doing out here?”

  I looked to see some bimbo looking blonde behind him.

  “Watch your drink,” I blurted as my cab pulled to the curb.

  I don’t even remember the ride back to Kylie’s. My mind was all over the place. I spent almost four years securing that memory away, and just like that the lock was broken. That dreadful night flooded my mind. I wanted to go home. I wanted Maddie and my safe little cabin in the woods.

  I did just that. I wasn’t drunk at all anymore. I sobered up the moment I saw that face. I’m not sure the officials would have agreed, but I felt more than capable of driving. I packed my things and left Kylie a note, making up some story about Maddie running a fever.

  I drove in stillness down the dark quiet highway. No music, just the roar of the tires, the sound of the engine, and my thoughts screaming. I couldn’t shake them. No matter how hard I tried, that night replayed over and over, bits and pieces I had chosen to obliterate. And just like the flip of a switch, they were there, crystal clear. Every last malodorous detail.

  I hadn’t even realized I was crying, not until I felt the clear liquid run down my face. That did it. I cried a river of tears. I couldn’t stop, and sobbed, producing one more sound to perceive. I just wanted my baby girl. I wanted her in my bed, sound asleep beside me. She was worth it. She was worth that horrible, atrocious night.

  I didn’t get my Maddie, of course. She was sleeping. It was almost two in the morning. I didn’t want to explain to my dad why I was home, why I was crying, or why I needed Maddie in the middle of the night.

  I showered away Alex for the one-millionth time, washing away all the things that he did to me well, trying anyway. It never worked, and this time was one of the worst. I let the hidden secrets surface. I would be okay now. I had my breakdown, cried like a baby, and washed the filth away, again. I would be okay come morning. I promised I would. Thank God I never had to see him again. I was going to the wedding in a couple of weeks, and heading right back to my safe little piece of heaven with Maddie. Yeah, that was all I needed: Maddie.

  By nine o’clock the next morning, I was regretting my decision to come home early. Maddie was beyond being a brat. That was exactly why I hated her spending two full days with my father. It took me a week to get her back to being somewhat compliant. She threw a hand full of M&M’s across the room, refused to clean them up, dumped apple juice on the floor, wanting to do it herself, spilled chocolate milk all over my cellphone, threw herself to the floor, screamed to the top of her lungs because I wouldn’t let her have a sharp knife to cut her hotdog, and used her entire bottle of baby shampoo for a bubble bath. This was all by noon. I just wanted her to take a nap. I was so stressed out, I could have screamed.

  She was much better after a nap. Thank God. I wasn’t sure I could handle her all day. I was ready to take her back to my dad and Dana. We went for a walk along the river and to our secret place. It was where I had originally wanted to build our little home. My dad, of course, wouldn’t let me. He thought it was too close to the river. Maddie would drown, or we would have a flash flood and be washed away.

  It was a clearing that I kept mowed with a path from our little cabin to the river bank. My dad brought in a load of sand every summer. Maddie and I had our own special little beach. She loved our little beach and so did I. It was a very shallow part of the river. I could sit in the warm sand while Maddie waded, trying to catch minnows in a sand bucket. She built dams like the beavers, ran screaming from the crawdads that were going to pinch her, fed the fish bread, and played in the sand with her shovel and bucket.

  “What on earth are you doing, child?” I asked, watching Maddie remove the stones from the stream and stack them on the beach.

  “I find a treasure,” she replied, continuing her job at hand. How she even knew what treasure was, is beyond me. Television, I guessed.

  “What kind of treasure?”

  “Um, a big one,” she exclaimed. Okay, maybe she didn’t know what treasure was.

  My dad tried to get us to come up to the house later for supper. I declined. I finally had Maddie back to being my little angel. I wasn’t subjecting her to my father giving her everything she wanted again. I was looking forward to cuddling with her on the couch, watching a movie, and maybe even some popcorn.

  We didn’t have the popcorn. Maddie was out by eight o’clock. I was happy. I was looking forward to an ice cold beer and a hot bath. I started my bath water, removed her pink panties, slid on a pull-up, and carried her to my bed. Normally I would have started her out in her own bed and wake up to her beside me in my bed, but I wanted her with me for whatever reason. She would be there in a couple of hours anyway.

  I heard the text message as I carried Maddie to bed. Good, the chocolate milk didn’t soak in too much. It was probably Kylie, I hadn’t heard from her yet. After my bath, I needed that, I would check it. I stayed in the hot bubbles until they weren’t so hot anymore. Wrapping my terry robe around me and smearing the green mask around my face, I walked to the refrigerator.

  My beer tasted so good, I decided to have another, and then another while sitting on the front porch listening to my favorite sounds. Kylie thought I was crazy for choosing to live back in the woods alone. She was scared to death to be sitting outside after dark. I loved it. There was no peace, like the peace in the deep woods after dark. It wasn’t really deep in the woods. I could see the lights from the resort in a distance. It still felt secluded though.

  I heard the text message again and got up to retrieve my phone, forgetting about the first one. Kylie was probably going crazy. She was one of those people who you had to answer right away, or she would keep calling and texting until you did.

  “Hello???” The unidentified number read.

  I swiped my thumb to see the one before it.

  Can we talk?

  I think you have the wrong number, I texted back.

  Is this Whitley?

  Hmm... Who the heck could this be? I bet Kylie gave Barry my number. I was going to kill her. She knew I hated that.

  Yes, who is this?

  It’s Alex. Please, can we talk?

  Are you serious? Leave me alone!!!!!!

  I turned my phone off after that. Logged onto my laptop and blocked the unwanted number from my phone. How the hell did he get my number? I thought cellphones were private and you couldn’t get those numbers, only house phones.

  I was sca
red all of a sudden. Why would Alex Wesson give a shit about me after all these years? Maybe I should just talk to him and tell him I forgive him. Hopefully, that would ease his guilty conscious and he would leave me alone. Okay, that was my plan. If Alex Wesson tried to contact me again, I would be civil. I would forgive him, if only with words. I had to. None of this could surface. It just couldn’t, I couldn’t let it.

  I didn’t have to worry about it. A month had passed and I never heard from Alex. I went to Lincoln two weeks later, attended Kylie’s wedding with no altercations, and slowly forgot about Alex Wesson. Thank God, he had chosen to leave it alone.

  <><><>

  “Maddie, come on. We have to go get your cake or we’re not going to have one for your party.”

  “I have a blowout candles,” she informed me.

  “Then get your shoes on so we can go,” I demanded.

  I should have left her with my dad and Dana. She threw a tantrum right off the bat, not wanting to ride in her car seat. She stood right beside me as we drove out the dirt road. She promised as soon as we got to the stop sign she would get in her seat. She did. Screaming and kicking her legs, but nonetheless, she was safely in her seat before we pulled out onto the main road.

  When we finally passed a field of horses, I was able to distract her from her tantrum. She forgot about not wanting to ride in her seat as I slowed down so that she could see the horses. She was a brat once again in the grocery store, and I was stressed to the max by the time I had a few groceries and the birthday cake. She needed a nap. There was no way we were going to make it through a birthday party like this. I was ready to cry and throw a fit with her.

  I dropped the cake off to my dad and Dana at the activity center. My stepmom was going to set up the party with the horse theme, and I was taking my whiny, crybaby daughter and force her to go to sleep.

  Thank the good Lord above, Maddie slept for two full hours while I worked the front office, checking in a few Saturday arrivals. Two hour naps could go either way. Sometimes it was too much and she would be whiny. Sometimes she needed the two hours and would wake up happy. I prayed that this one would be a happy one.