Seeing Davis again after a decade shook me up more than I wanted to admit. By the time I walked into the catering kitchen, my breath pushed in and out of my chest in hard gasps, and goosebumps checked my arms. I threw down my tray, wrapped a hand around the steel beam of the food prep station, and tried to steady my feet.
Didn’t work.
“Samantha, are you okay?” Nicole, the co-owner of Haute Holidays, the catering company Ainsley and Trevor had hired for their wedding, asked. She wiped her hands on her black apron. “You look paler than normal.”
“I’m—I just…”
I’m falling apart inside, that’s all.
“Do you need some water?” She turned to Steve, another waiter who’d also arrived back in the kitchen, empty tray in his hand. “Do you mind getting her some water?”
“Sure thing,” he muttered then grabbed a bottle from the cooler located at the edge of the prep station. He handed the bottle to me. “Here you go. You look terrible. Are you sick?”
“Yeah.” I took the water from him, opened it, and downed a large swig. “I think I am.”
Nicole stepped around the table and placed the back of her hand across my forehead. “You’re clammy.”
I nodded a few times. “I need to…I need to go home.”
Which pained me to say. Going home early meant I’d only get paid for half of the evening, and I counted on the one fifty a full night’s work with Haute Holidays paid at an event like this one. The larger the party, the more money we made, and evenings on the island paid more than the ones in the rest of Palm Beach County.
And God, I could use that extra seventy-five bucks…
“Sam! What’s going on?” Nicole yelped as I sank into the prep station. My knees had finally given out on me, and I knew why—I hadn’t slept well in weeks, hadn’t eaten much in the last three days, and had just seen the one person I’d ever loved after ten years of separation. It was all a little too much to handle.
“You’re going home,” Nicole said. “You can’t work like this.”
I didn’t argue. She was right.
With a fresh bottle of water beside me in the car, and strict instructions from Nicole to call her in the morning and tell her how I felt, I drove home about a half hour after I’d seen Davis. I pulled my aging Toyota Corolla into the parking spot that accompanied my shabby apartment, turned off the engine, and let out a long, loud groan.
Seeing Davis Armstrong at the reception hadn’t been on my list of possible outcomes. I’d forgotten that the Armstrongs and the Rosses were friends and business associates.
You shouldn’t have forgotten that, Sam.
I steeled my nerves, got out of my car, and shuffled to my lower-level apartment. When I opened the unlocked front door, I heard the hum of a college football game and found my mother sitting on the couch, attached to the oxygen tank that helped her breathe on the nights when her emphysema acted up.
“You’re home early,” Mom said in a raspy voice, one that sounded nothing like it did when I was a kid. She coughed. “I thought you’d return after midnight.”
“Not feeling too well.” I kicked off my black work shoes, dropped my clear plastic purse beside them, and sank into the overstuffed armchair near the sofa. It creaked under my weight, and still carried the faint, rank smell of cigarettes. “They sent me home early. Said they had enough people to cover the rest of the wedding.”
“A shame. We could have used that cash.” She coughed again, a little louder that time.
“I know.” I tightened my jaw and forced myself to focus on the television, which showed live coverage of the college football bowl game between Florida State and Notre Dame. The Seminoles led by a touchdown, but the teams still had a quarter to play.
As I watched, the screen flipped to a shot of several students cheering on the team. They held signs while wearing school colors, and the happy looks on their faces sent a chill through me. I’d only been able to pay for two semesters at FSU before life intervened.
“Someday, you’ll go back to there, back to Tallahassee,” Mom said, reading my mind. “When we’ve got enough of the tuition saved.”
“Yep.” I kept my eyes on the TV screen. The two of us had played this game hundreds of times before. We’d play it hundreds more. And I knew it would never happen. I’d never resume my studies at FSU. I’d never be able to save up the thousands it cost each semester in tuition, or win enough scholarships, or get enough loans approved for the cost. I’d never get a degree in marketing or even an associate in communications.
It would never happen. Ever. Any money I made had a much higher purpose—my mother’s mounting medical bills and our daily expenses.
There was no room for extra. There was no we when it came to saving for college. There was only one of us who could work. Only ever would be, and I still felt life had been incredibly cruel. To dangle the carrot that money from the payoff would provide open doors and multiple opportunities—college, a future—had been a horrible lie. It had worked…for a while. Until the first diagnosis…
But here we are. With nothing but each other.
We sat in silence for a while, watching the game clock wind down. A few minutes after eleven, Mom announced she felt more tired than usual, and she wanted to go to bed. She got up from the couch, kissed me on the forehead, and dragged the oxygen machine into the apartment bedroom.
Once I felt confident she was asleep, I moved from the living room into the galley kitchen. A stack of bills waited for me on the counter. Besides the rent, we could afford to pay three of them that month—a credit card bill with a minimum payment, the electric bill, and one of Mom’s copays from her recent stint in the emergency room.
The rest would have to wait.
I stared at the ones we wouldn’t be able to pay and silently cursed. I shouldn’t have let seeing Davis Armstrong affect me that way, shouldn’t have let him derail me from making money we desperately needed.
I opened the cabinet below the sink and found the bottle of cheap vodka I’d hidden there months before. I’d taken it one night when a Haute Holidays client bought too much booze for a fashion show and didn’t want to take the rest.
I twisted off the lid and downed a large swig of the clear liquid. The liquor warmed my blood and took off the edge I’d felt swirling inside me. After a moment, I did another shot from the bottle.
Then I shuffled to the couch, stripped down to my camisole and underwear, and stretched out on the cushions. When the first wave of exhaustion passed over me, I pulled the threadbare black blanket off the back of the sofa and wrapped it around my body.
A few moments later, I fell into a fitful, dreamless sleep.