CHAPTER SIX
Aside from her first day of college in New Hampshire, Skye had never felt so alone in a strange place. At least in college, she took comfort knowing scores of fellow freshmen were likely feeling the same way. Skye watched customers come in and go out with their orders, sit contentedly with their laptops or phones, chatting knowingly with their friends and significant others, all oblivious to the stranger sitting by the window in the back of the café who hadn’t been in town for more than twenty-four hours and whose life had turned to shambles. So when the familiar figure entered the coffee shop, she stood up and waved him over, tempted to hug him. He was dressed in a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and work boots speckled with paint. What she’d thought was even more gray in his hair since she’d last seen him also turned out to be paint. She tried to picture him in a suit and tie, hair slicked back, suave, and failed. He was attractive in a preppie-meets-scruffy kind of way. Like what Jake Ryan from Sixteen Candles might look like when he hit middle age. Which made Skye wonder what Harvey looked like younger, which then made her wonder who would want to see Jake Ryan all grown up. Preserve that teen dream at all costs.
Not that she ever wanted to look at another man again. Maybe she could join a convent. Or buy one of those tiny houses that you could hitch up on wheels and take with you wherever you went. Or a used Winnebago to drive back to Warwick. And then live in it on someone’s property.
No. Chip would never stand for it.
He reached her table. “You OK?” he asked.
She nodded, overcome with emotion just at the sight of someone familiar. “I can’t thank you enough for picking me up,” she said.
“You’re welcome. Mind if I order something and sit down first? Are you in a hurry?”
“No, it’s OK,” she said, thinking about Chip.
“Want anything?” She shook her head and thanked him and watched him order coffee and a danish at the counter before joining her again.
“I’m really, really sorry to take you away from your work,” she said.
“It’s OK. Luckily, I only had a minor job today, and was just about finished with it when you called.”
“Do you like it? Painting, I mean.” Odd for her to engage in such casual conversation at that moment, but she needed the normalcy; otherwise she would break down on the spot. It grounded her.
He nodded. “I find it relaxing, believe it or not.” He took a bite of danish followed by a sip of coffee, and tossed the chitchat aside. “So what’s up, Skye? How can I help you, aside from giving you a ride back to your hotel?”
“I feel foolish. I had another bout of temporary insanity and thought facing Vance would make everything better.”
At first, she thought he might grill her, like Julie would, or even scold her, like Summer would. Instead, he nodded. “Yeah, that’s understandable, albeit futile.”
“He just stood there, completely nonchalant, and told me he changed his mind. Just like that. Told me to go home.”
Harvey shook his head in disbelief. “Fucking coward.”
She winced. Twenty-four hours ago, he wasn’t a fucking coward. Or rather, she didn’t know him as such. Twenty-four hours ago, he was the man she was about to spend her life with. The severity of the change was dizzying.
“Anyway, I should have just called a cab or an Uber driver, but . . . I don’t know, I was just feeling so devastated and abandoned and alone and . . .” She dropped her head in shame.
He sat and listened and looked at her compassionately. “I’m glad you called, Skye. I told you you could. I’ll take you back to your hotel whenever you want.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I left Chip there, and he’s probably freaking out. I also need to start making a plan to get back to Rhode Island.”
“You’re going back, huh?” said Harvey. His tone had changed. Not that he had become harsh or judgmental, just . . . different.
“What else is there for me here? I didn’t secure employment. Vance said there was no rush for me to find work, that the job market was good and he’d support me for the first couple of weeks. He made it sound like a vacation. And while I’ve always been able to pay my bills, I’ve mostly lived paycheck to paycheck, putting away a lot of money into retirement.”
“That’s smart.”
“Maybe, but it leaves me with next to nothing in the meantime. I sold or gave away most of my furniture and kitchen stuff, and it still cost me a grand to move boxes of books, keepsakes, winter clothes, stereo, things like that. Plus, I had to put money down on the storage unit, buy my airline ticket . . . I even sold my car.” She grimaced as she recalled telling Vance how exciting it would be to drive across country, and Vance in turn telling her that she wouldn’t need it because he lived close to downtown and thus she could walk to “everything.”
What about work, though? I’m going to need a car to get to and from a job, she’d said.
So, you take the money you made from selling your car, and use it as a down payment on a new one here, he’d replied. It’s a new chapter to your life, after all.
She’d been so naive to think he was encouraging her rather than setting her up for disaster. She should have known she wouldn’t get much for a 2004 Honda Civic that she’d bought used ten years ago.
Harvey leaned forward and looked directly at Skye. His brown eyes were less almond- and more oval-shaped. Sad, even. Puppyish.
“Skye, I know he took everything, but make him pay for it. Don’t give him the satisfaction of having beat you.”
Skye straightened her posture. “And how do I do that?”
“Did you ever watch The Six Million Dollar Man?”
She eyed him quizzically.
He tried again. “Lee Majors? The bionic man?”
She remained stupefied. He seemed irked for a second, as if to say, How could you not know something so vitally important? but quickly resigned to her lapse of knowledge.
“Before your time, I guess. Well, here’s what I’m getting at. It was a TV show in the seventies. Steve Austin was an astronaut whose spacecraft wiped out, leaving him all but dead. And this guy named Oscar Goldman says: ‘Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Faster.’ They spent six million dollars to make it happen. Hence the title of the show.”
He was passionate and resolute. She, on the other hand, stared at him as if he were a foreign object, speaking gibberish.
“Honest to God, Harvey, I have no idea what you’re trying to tell me.”
Harvey smiled amiably, mischievously, knowingly. “I’m telling you that we’re going to rebuild you, and your life. And for a hell of a lot less than six million bucks.”
Something flickered in her chest. “We?”
“Well, figuratively, we. Actually, it’s all on you. But you can do it. And you’ll beat the shit out of that frogface fuckmonger Vance Sandler when you do.”
She considered her alternatives yet again: Go back to Warwick and Top Drawer if they’d have her back (Dan the regional manager did say they were sorry to see her go, asked if there was anything they could say or do to convince her to stay), and forget all about Vance Sandler. Pretend none of this ever happened, like it was all a bad dream. She could do that, and eventually things would go back to normal.
But “normal” was what sent her off the deep end in the first place, wasn’t it? She had been thoroughly dissatisfied with “normal.”
And she didn’t want her job back. She’d never wanted it in the first place. At least not for as long as she’d had it. She had attended a job fair at her college prior to graduation, stopped at the Top Drawer booth, and filled out an application, figuring it would be good for something to do until she decided what she was going to do with her degree in marketing and management. Almost the same degree as Summer’s, which her parents had said would be far more useful (Look at what it’s done for your sister) after they’d practically bullied her into going to college rather than get a real estate license straight out of high school, which was what she’d wanted to do. She’d even lined up an internship at a real estate office for the summer. You may think selling houses is all glamour and makes you rich, but it’s not and it won’t. Trying to explain that her motive for getting into real estate had little to do with money or glamour fell on deaf ears. She’d wanted to be around the houses themselves. So she gave up and did what she was told to do.
The Top Drawer booth representatives had told her about “promising career opportunities” for people with marketing and management degrees such as hers. Enticed her with phrases like “corporate benefits,” “upward mobility,” and “free product.” Punch lines, she eventually came to see them as. Of course, you’ll need to begin at the store level and learn the ins and outs, they’d said. She’d been OK with that condition, was eager to learn. And she was, indeed, promoted to assistant manager within her first year at the Providence Place location and, two years later, elevated to manager of the store in the Warwick Mall. For twelve years. She’d occasionally hear about a job opening at corporate headquarters, located in San Antonio, Texas, for something like a marketing analyst or operations director or a position in human resources. But the positions either required a master’s degree, which she’d never gotten; extensive travel, which she didn’t want because she thought it would hamper her social life (Ha!); relocation, which she didn’t want to do, especially not to someplace like Texas that only had two seasons—hot and hotter; or qualifications beyond her scope and experience. The “free product” part was an occasional bra-and-panty set for whatever new line had launched; however, neither ever fit her, and she wound up giving them to her sister or Julie.
She’d dreamed big and gone nowhere. And her latest dream—living happily ever after with Vance—shattered her heart and soul.
She had to walk among the shards of her life and figure out a way to keep it going.
She had to start over and use every ounce of strength to fight from being suffocated by her regrets.
But what if starting over wasn’t a punishment, but an opportunity? What if it was a chance to do what she wanted to do, on her own terms and in her own way?
And wouldn’t staying in Billings be a better way to “make Vance pay” rather than crawling back to Rhode Island with her tail between her legs?
Yes. Yes to all of it. She just needed to figure out what she wanted and how to make it happen. Above all, she needed to prove to Vance—no, to herself—that he might have beaten her down, but she could get back up.
She looked at Harvey, who finished the last of his coffee and danish.
“So what happened to the Steve Austin guy?” she asked.
Harvey stood up. “He went after Bigfoot, hooked up with a bionic woman, and did everything in slow motion.”
She was totally fucked.
“C’mon, Skye,” he said, gathering his trash. “Let’s get you back.”