Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 70546 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70546 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
I want to drive in and tell them that I love them and appreciate them. That I might have moved out here, but I’ll always be a part of them, and I appreciate that they worry. I still cringe about the cameras, but I do get that they care. I wasn’t making it easy for them, and yet they still stuck it out. They’ve always cared. I bucked against the idea of marriage to Nina, but I bucked against all the other ways they tried too.
While I feel this off-kilter, I’m doing what I need to be doing out here, which is keeping busy. It means repairing Herman Merman’s fence for the six hundredth and forty-third time. He’ll still find a way to get out no matter what, and I’ll still try and find a way to keep him in.
Animals sense when a person is hurting, and while the sheep have given me a wide berth today, preferring their own company out in the field to my moody, broody self, Herman Merman comes up and nudges my shoulder with his nose.
I laugh at him and reach for his muzzle to give it a stroke. “We make good company, don’t we, boy? Two stubborn grouches.”
He brays a full heeee-haaaww at me, turns his face, and gives me a wet tongue to the cheek. He’s never done that before. It’s slimy, but it’s nice. The sheep have each other, and the chickens do too. There are three cats, so if they want company, they can have it, even though they’re more solitary. I only have one dog, but Shaggy keeps himself busy. He’s happy here and far more independent for a dog than I ever would have thought one could be. But Herman Merman? He’s alone, and he needs a friend. I’ve been meaning to get one for him for months now, so I’m going to do that. Today. I’ll find another donkey today. I know what it’s like to feel completely alone. No wonder he’s always trying to escape. He wants to get out and be with everyone else because he’s got no one else like him to be with inside here.
I pet Herman Merman’s neck, scratching him in the spots I know he likes.
Nina left yesterday morning, and it’s not even noon now. I guess, by now, it’s been a full twenty-four hours, but it feels more like a million years have passed. I know people use that all the time to exaggerate the slow passage of minutes and hours, or, god forbid, days, but I truly do feel like at least three ice ages have come and gone.
I know it’s bad when I see my grandma’s car coming down the driveway, and I don’t even get my typical feelings of sort of angry resentment. I don’t even wish I’d spent time in the barn fabbing a spike belt. I just lean against the fence the same way I leaned against it the day Nina walked up my driveway and changed everything, feeling…defeated.
I didn’t even feel close to this bad when I found out about Janet. That was a different kind of feeling, mostly betrayal and humiliation. I didn’t feel the crushing amount of hurt I should have felt if I had loved her properly. It stung, but this was more like a whole hive of wasps going apeshit crazy on me and pelting me all over than one tiny little lone pissed-off wasp taking matters into its own hands.
It’s just Granny this time. She gets out of the car and walks toward the field. I do her a favor by giving Herman Merman one last reassuring pat, getting down on my belly, and shimmying under the fence. Talking across barbed wire could get dicey, knowing my grandma, and I don’t want any mishaps.
My granny is the type of person who wears every emotion on every part of her sleeve, and right now, she looks like she’s bringing the wasps to me. I know she’s going to give me a lecture about letting Nina go, especially since she was hoping for more. More from me. More from the both of us together.
She does the typical angry grandma stance and throws her hands on her hips. Today, she didn’t come in her usual tracksuit. Today, she came wearing a pink floral power suit, which doesn’t bode well for me. She’s probably going to head straight to her lawyer after this and disown my parents and me. Maybe she just came from there. As per usual, she gets right into speaking what’s on her mind. “If you weren’t into radical change, then why did you make that poor girl believe you cared?”
“Ca—what?” Oh, this is going to be even more exasperating than I thought. I’ve taken enough punishment all night, beating myself up. I don’t need Grandma to come here and start in on me too.