Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 77005 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77005 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
There’s something innately therapeutic about talking to animals. For starters, they’re great listeners, they don’t ever judge, and their capacity to forgive brings tears to my eyes.
Mona and I have seen cases of neglect and abuse so horrid it makes you despair at the human race. And yet those same animals have become loving and sweet when they’re shown a little kindness, patience, and consistency. They never stopped wanting to trust. They never stopped giving humans the opportunity to not fail them.
In the back pocket of my jeans, my phone rings. Cat’s in the Cradle by Harry Chapin plays.
Talk about failure.
I silence the call and wait to see if she leaves a message. As soon as it finishes recording, I hit the speaker button.
“Hello, Miss Blue Baldwin. It’s Athena Baldwin, calling to see how you are. Did you try the caffeine enema I told you about? I sent you the link on your gmail account”––I hear unintelligible voices in the background––“Dammit, they ran over the sump pump again. I gotta go. I’ll call you when I get to Port-au-Prince. We really need to connect. There’s something I need to discuss with you.”
I immediately hit erase on the voicemail and stuff the phone back in my pocket.
Show me a parent who addresses their daughter by her full name and I’ll show you a parent who doesn’t know their child.
My parents separated when I was six. One random Saturday in August, my mother packed two suitcases and took off to the outer reaches of who-the-hell-knows-where in her attempt to save the world. She joined an NGO and my father became a single parent overnight with no warning.
These are two people who should’ve never been married in the first place, let alone breed. Athena is a flighty quitter masquerading as an activist and my father’s a cop, as strait-laced and set in his ways as you can get. It’s like a rabbit trying to mate with a turtle. Forget polar opposites, they’re practically a different species.
Anyway, they never divorced. To this day, and for reasons no one can figure out, she still proudly brandishes the Baldwin family name even though they haven’t been in the same room more than three times in the last twenty-two years.
Obviously, my mother and I are not close, but after the incident, she started calling more, which is just her style. Swooping in when there’s a crisis and expecting credit for the most superficial of efforts is right on brand for her. Behaving as if she hasn’t been missing in action for the last twenty-plus years is a textbook Athena Baldwin move. My mother has always played the upper hand like a fiddle in a Grand Ole Opry performance. It was hard to complain about her missing my fifth-grade flute recital when she explained that she had to miss it because she was saving starving children in Sudan. Especially when she then went ahead and showed me pictures of those children.
I used to harbor a lot of resentment about this. And for the most part, I’ve let it go. She doesn’t get to rock my world (in a bad way) because I won’t allow her to have any power over me. That doesn’t mean I’m rolling out the red carpet for her to waltz back into my life only to ghost me when she gets bored, and saying no doesn’t make me a bad person.
The deep-throated rumble of tail pipes cuts into my musings. I scramble out of the paddock to investigate what the ruckus is about and hit the brakes the second I round the corner of the barn.
The sound belongs to a vintage bike. Motorcycle not Schwinn. The rider, a tall man with broad shoulders, gets off with his back to me, removes his black helmet and runs his fingers through his thick, dark hair. A strange, speeding sensation comes over me as I watch him take the aviator sunglasses hanging on his black t-shirt and put them on.
It’s Hughes. It has to be Hughes. He’s got that snappy, overpriced look about him that seems to be standard issue for celebrities. Distressed jeans. Distressed black t-shirt. Distressed attitude judging by a fleeting glance I get of his profile.
But what’s he doing here?
He and his minions are supposed to arrive tomorrow per the countless emails and phone calls I’ve received since we agreed on terms. I scan the horizon and can’t locate anyone else.
Regardless, it’s go-time. I can’t hide—which, frankly, I do contemplate for a split second—and I can’t have him wandering the property. So, taking a deep breath, I muster the will to put one foot in front of the other and meet this problem head on.
This is where things get funky. And what I mean by funky is worse. Because the closer I get to him, the larger he becomes. And the larger he becomes, the more unsettled I start to feel.