Starting the morning was not easy to do. Melody kept rolling over on her uncomfortable little sofa bed and trying to decide whether or not she should just stay there all day long. She did not have to be at work until almost two in the afternoon. It was part of Janice’s attempt to cut Melody’s hours back to only forty. No more double shifts. No more open-to-close marathons. Of course, that pretty much meant no more money, but there was nothing Melody could do about that.
Or was there? There was always the possibility that she could still find a way to make the ranch a reality. It wasn’t necessarily the draw of the ranch. She just wanted the house. Maybe that was what she needed to focus on. Maybe Weatherby didn’t understand that. Maybe he thought that she wanted to kick him off the leased land. That thought would be bound to make any businessman who was also a rancher feel threatened.
Flopping onto her back, Melody glared at the ceiling. “Maybe it’s all because of Cisco Hernandez. Maybe if I spoke to Weatherby without any Hernandez drama around, he would be different. The guy is a cop. He can’t really be a crook. He wouldn’t last very long as a cop. Would he?”
Ugh! Why was she talking to herself? It was silly. She hated how she very often wound up having long, rambling conversations with herself because she didn’t have anyone else to talk to. That was depressing. Actually, her whole life was depressing. It was time to make a change. She had to stop letting other people make decisions and unravel her confusing situations. It was time to do things for herself.
Unfortunately, that required getting out of bed. Normally it did not bother her that she slept on a sagging sofa bed. It was horribly uncomfortable. Usually she was just so tired that it didn’t make a difference. She could have slept on the floor and her body would not have noticed. Lately though, she had been getting more opportunity to sleep. She had been spending hours in the bed when before it had felt like minutes.
That was enough to decide her. Melody sat up and flung her legs over the side of the sofa. She rubbed her face and managed to gain her feet without falling over. It was a very near thing. Her back was aching horribly as she stood there, and it was tempting to sit back down. Unfortunately, she had a bad feeling that sitting back down would not help.
The Farrell’s house had all of that furniture in it. There were beds and tables and dressers and practically every kind of chair imaginable. There was a kitchen with a real refrigerator and a double oven. Two ovens! She wouldn’t even be sure what to do with one of them! And the idea of sleeping on a bed every single night tucked beneath a down comforter or a blanket on cold evenings was like sheer heaven.
Melody pulled on clothing. Not a uniform for once but real clothing. She didn’t have much. There was simply no reason. She had been working at the coffee shop for years. The black pants and green or blue polo shirts had become the mainstay of her wardrobe.
It felt strange to pull on a pair of jeans. They were looser than she remembered, which was odd. Melody was not a thin person. In fact, she would have called herself rather chunky at one point, but in the last few years since graduating high school, turning eighteen, and getting out on her own, she had started to slim down in a way that did not suggest healthy eating habits.
Her stomach rumbled as if it were trying to remind her that she hadn’t eaten anything yet today because she wasn’t at work. Of course, there wasn’t any kind of real food in the apartment either. The only thing in the cabinet was her meager supply of noodle soup waiting to be heated in the microwave with water and the contents of the little spice packet.
With a deep sigh, Melody shoved her feet into her only pair of shoes and started to walk out the door. But when she pulled her front door open, there was a shocking surprise waiting on the doorstep.
“Allie?”
“I got kicked out of my apartment,” Allie moaned. She was sniffling and sobbing in a heap on the ground. “I don’t have anywhere to go. Will you let me stay with you?”
This was not the first time that Allie had attempted to move in with Melody over the years, but the idea was preposterous. Melody’s place was one room. It was only a few hundred square feet and was packed full with Melody’s small collection of belongings. There was no room for anyone else, their stuff, or even their breathing.
“Please?” Allie whined. “I don’t have a job. I don’t have a place to live. I don’t have any money. And now I don’t even know how I’ll change that.”
Melody struggled not to roll her eyes. She loved Allie. They had been friends for years, but all of a sudden, Melody was tired of taking care of other people. She had her own shit to worry about.
“Get up off the floor,” Melody snapped at Allie. “Seriously. Have you just been lying there on my doorstep feeling sorry for yourself?”
“I didn’t want to wake you up.” Allie sounded defensive.
Allie managed to pull herself to her feet using the doorjamb. She was still weaving and shaking when she walked. Melody was reminded of Cisco’s thought that there was some other substance at work here. In the past, Melody had never known Allie to do anything more serious than weed, but there was always the possibility that Ryan had stepped up his game trying to make Allie dependent.
Melody shut her front door. She pointed to the tiny table with two chairs in the “kitchen” portion of the room. “Sit down. When was the last time you ate something?”
“I don’t remember.” Allie took a seat and slumped onto the table. There was something distinctly pouty about her attitude.
“You better stop acting like a spoiled brat,” Melody warned her friend. “I swear I will dump you right back out on the street and leave you there if you act like I owe you something.”
“You’re the one who swapped schedules with me the other night!” Allie sat trembling in the chair and managed to point accusingly at Melody. “You got me fired.”
Melody rolled her eyes because she had her back to Allie and her friend could not see. Then she shoved a package of noodles into a big hard plastic bowl and put it in the microwave. It took very little time at all to heat the stuff up and then place the bowl of food in front of Allie. In that short amount of time, Melody managed to figure out what she needed to say to Allie. Or at least what she could say without losing her temper.
“Allie, your shift started at four in the morning,” Melody reminded her friend. She took the chair on the opposite side of the table and watched as Allie began hungrily devouring the noodles. “Are you telling me that I ruined your life because I went to work at four in the morning for you and made it so you didn’t have to be there until noon? Are you actually claiming that you would have made it in by four o’clock when you couldn’t get there by noon? You did not call Janice. At all. You never called. You never went in to try and smooth things over. I bet you still haven’t tried to call Janice. If you went in there and proved to her that you’re done with whatever thing you’ve got going on right now, she might change her mind!”
“I don’t want to talk to Janice,” Allie mumbled. “She’s mean.”
“She’s a boss.” Ugh! Melody could not believe she was defending Janice’s behavior. The dragon lady was a horrible manager. She wasn’t a people person or a team player, and it showed. She was just a boss. Unfortunately, that did not mean she was wrong. “I don’t like how Janice runs the place either, but it isn’t my call to say whether or not she does it right or wrong, Allie. I’m not a manager. I’m just an employee.”
“You’re on her side,” Allie said nastily.
Melody wasn’t getting anywhere like this. It would be better to try and figure out what was going on with Allie’s living situation. “So, tell me how you got kicked out of your place. Ryan was only there for a few days, right?”
Allie sucked up a noodle and swiped the back of her hand over her mouth. She refused to meet Melody’s gaze. This was not looking good. Finally, Allie muttered under her breath.
“What?” Melody snapped. “I can’t understand the mumbling. So, maybe you’d better speak up.
“I said,” Allie snarled, “that Ryan has been there two months.”
“Two months!” Melody gaped at her friend. “What? Were you hiding him under your sofa?”
“He was working!” Allie shot back defensively. She quickly sucked up the remaining noodles as though she thought Melody would take them away. “He was working for a friend. The job fell through last week.”
“Let me guess,” Melody grunted. “He got caught doing drugs at work.”
“It wasn’t true!” Allie was almost surely obsessed with this guy. If nothing else, she was absolutely codependent. It wasn’t good at all, and it was starting to drive Melody crazy.
“Look.” Melody reached across the table and grabbed Allie’s forearm. She gave it a light squeeze. “That man is trouble. Apparently, you haven’t been paying your rent for two months. I’m guessing you missed month number three too. I don’t know what your payment deadline was, but the grace period was probably the fifteenth. Right? So, Ryan was smoking and drinking and God knows what else with your rent money. You didn’t pay it. And then you started using again. Now you’ve lost your apartment.”
“I’ll figure it out. I just need to crash at your place for a few days.” Allie’s tone went from petulant to pleading in the blink of an eye.
“I have a one-room studio!” Melody reminded her. “I don’t pay for an extra person. I don’t have my own bathroom, and the landlord will kick me out if they see anyone else using the bathroom!”
“Can’t you put in a request for a guest pass?” Allie asked hopefully.
Melody pursed her lips. This was not going to be good. “Allie, you’re a horrible guest. We’ve tried this once before when they were fumigating your apartment for roaches. You stayed two nights and it drove me nuts. You used up all the hot water in the building. You ate everything in the house. And you didn’t bother to chip in for anything. I love you. You’re my friend. I’ve always stood beside you when things went down the toilet, but you’re going to have to go home to your mom’s for a few days to get yourself together.”
“What?”
Allie jumped up out of the chair so quickly that it flipped over backwards. Then Allie banged her shins on the chair legs and tripped. She went down on her knees and sat there in the middle of the floor crying and sobbing as though she were brokenhearted. Melody did not have time for this. She still wanted to try and talk to Paul Weatherby about the Farrell ranch. She needed to get going if she was going to make it to the police station in the city and get back in time to go to work.
“Where are you going?”
Melody glanced down at Allie. The woman had stopped crying. Now she was staring at Melody’s jeans and T-shirt as though she could not even begin to understand why Melody wasn’t in work clothes.
“I have an appointment this morning.” It was more that Melody hoped she had an appointment, but that detail didn’t really matter. “I need to get going or I won’t make it back in time to go to work.”
“Why aren’t you already there?” Allie’s self-absorption was apparently dissipating enough that she was suddenly noticing things that did not immediately involve her problems. “Shouldn’t you already be at work?”
“Janice cut my hours.” Melody shrugged. It didn’t really matter at this point. What was done was done. “She hired a replacement for you and an additional person. She doesn’t want us maxing out on hours anymore.”
“But you need those hours!” Allie protested. Her eyes went wide. “How are you going to pay your bills?”
“I guess that’s my problem,” Melody said flatly. “Why do you care? You never seem to give a crap about my bills or my problems. You just want me to take care of you, let you live in my apartment, and feed you my food. That’s what matters to you, Allie. And that’s why I’m sending you to your mom. I just can’t take care of you anymore, Allie.” It was odd. It actually hurt to say that out loud. It felt like an admission of failure.
Allie pulled herself up off the floor but made no move to right the chair or clean up her bowl. This was pretty much how it was with Allie. She didn’t want to care for herself. She wanted to be taken care of. And that’s why men like Ryan could just push their way into her life. They convinced her that they were “taking care” of her even though she was actually caring for them. But when she was alone—without a man—she could not even function.
Melody didn’t want to be like that. She wanted to be independent. But maybe that’s what she had been doing. She had been expecting Cisco Hernandez to fix the ranch problems for her. It wasn’t his responsibility. It was hers. And it was high time that she figured this out for herself and take control of her own life.