by L. M. Boelz
Chapter 4: Starting Over
With the packing almost finished, Carol didn’t have the same feeling of; Here we go, moving again. She was sure that her mother felt the same way, when she would catch her looking out the front window, which was about the time Dad would have normally come home from work. They could not wait to leave this place. The house felt so empty now that Dad was gone. None of this felt real to either of them.
It was just a few weeks after Christmas, when the accident had happened. Carol’s mother had wanted her husband to wait for the ice on the roof to melt, so that it wouldn’t be so slippery. Carol guessed that her dad didn’t want to get caught being the last one on the block to take down their Christmas lights, so he had gone up to take them down, before leaving for work one day. Carol wished that he would have waited, maybe then he would not have fallen, maybe… then…
Oh, how I have come to dislike that word: maybe. Nothing good ever happened when the sentence contained the word maybe, Carol lamented to herself.
Before he died, he had tried to keep everyone’s spirits up by saying that everything would be alright soon. This time, he was wrong. It wasn’t going to be okay. He was gone, and he wasn’t coming back. For now; however, they would have to do the best they could.
At least one good thing came from her mother taking on all of those baking jobs, the way that she did. One of her best customers took a liking to her and offered her a job in one of her businesses, in a small town up state. Carol knew that they were both ready to leave this time, because there was nothing left for them here.