Unable To Say Goodbye

H.S. Darke

Description

Dealing with divorce is never easy to do, especially when a child is involved. But Brian was having a particularly hard time. It seemed he never got over losing Angelica to her new lover, but that wasn't the greatest loss he'd faced. If ever there was a guardian angel in his life, perhaps he was no further away than his best friend Jason. While Jason seemed an unlikely candidate to be a guardian angel in the biblical or even noblest sense of the term, he may have what it takes to save Brian from his own demise. But that's a big maybe.

Sujets

• Fiction
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 09 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781984577924
• Langue: English

Extrait

Unable to Say GOODBYE
 
 
 
 
 
 
H.S. DARKE
 
 
Copyright © 2020 by H.S. Darke.
 
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-9845-7793-1

eBook
978-1-9845-7792-4
 
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 05/17/2023
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
811629
CONTENTS
Chapter 1   The Routine
The Night That Didn’t Happen
Chapter 2   The Nutcracker
Investigative Work and Sex
The East Coast Atlantic Paranormal & EVP Society
New York
Chapter 3   She’s Not That Bad
Legal Endings
Are You a Little Kid?
Slam Fire
Chanel No. 5
That Horrible Day
Chapter 4   The Spectator
Force Feeding Contentment
Awkward Confrontations
Too Much Little Water
Stewardess
Chapter 5   Scholarship
Paris
The Mirror
Chapter 6   Jealousy is a Dish Best Not Served
Showdown at the Dark Bean
Country Roads
Dedicated to Bella and Sasa
 
 
 
 

CHAPTER 1
The Routine
B RIAN WAS DROPPING off Aneysa at middle school, his one and only daughter, his baby doll. She was already going through that age where she was a know-it-all, and she’d decided that she was too big to be as affectionate with her father as compared to when she was four years old or even eight. Brian sometimes wished he could have his four-year-old daughter back, but he understood. She was becoming a young lady, though she was only twelve. When she was younger, she always used to give him a hug and kiss before getting out of the car; those were moments he always cherished. Perhaps a little more annoying, however, was that now she insisted on sitting in the backseat instead of up front with him, making him feel more like her chauffeur than her father, and she didn’t even say goodbye anymore when she got out of the car to run to her friends who were waiting for her.
Still, before Brian drove off, he texted her, “I love you baby doll.”
About fifteen minutes later, she texted back, “I love you too daddy.” That was the new norm by that time. She responded to her father’s texts with a delay that, while probably discourteous on some level, drove him into minor depressed stupors, but when she’d respond, his spirits would be lifted and the prior depression forgotten. The depression he felt, while seemingly an annoyanc e at worst, could later manifest itself into something unfortunate if he wasn’t careful, if he himself was lackadaisical in dealing with it. But he avoided confrontations with Neysa at all costs, and that was, sadly, a dynamic of relationships within the context of divorce.
It was via texting, however, that Neysa, what her parents actually called her, remained most like the four-year-old child he remembered . . . the irony. Therefore, he cherished her texts tremendously, no matter what they said. At one point right after the divorce, he tried group texting his ex-wife Angelica and Neysa. He reasoned that it was the closest he could come to feeling like he was in a family again. It was entirely one-sided, however; whatever Angelica texted Neysa was known only to those two. And for whatever reason, soon after he attempted to make this a standard way of texting, it soon fell by the wayside, and it devolved back into one-on-one texting.
This was a Monday. Brian had had Neysa for the weekend. The routine was always the same as before. Every other Saturday, they’d get home, and Neysa would go up to her room, only coming down for dinner. She needed that alone time to catch up on all her social media. She especially loved to snapchat. Being a very talented ballet dancer, or ballerina as she preferred, most of her interactions involved other ballet dancers in the world, ballet shoes, hairstyles, making fun of the instructors, the other dance students, and which boys weren’t gay. Their internal name for the male dancers of their school, who the girls both thought had cooties and were cute at the same time, was wannabe-danzatores. They called them danzees for short. Those words weren’t normally used in American schools, but this school went out of its way to recruit Italian dance instructors, so there was a kind of international air that pervaded the vernacular. Because they competed with another school in the same city who had the market cornered on ex-Russian Ballet instructors, this all culminated in a sort of elitism, though rather childish and benign, the result being, again, picking on the boys.
Dinnertime arrived, and Brian knew what she would eat. Her favorite meal was macaroni ’n cheese, but she would refuse that if a performance was just around the corner. When that was the case, he had to offer her salad with egg and cheese, but no croutons. Neysa insisted on being vegetarian, and Brian and Angelica hated it, but they let her do it to make her feel like she was grown-up and capable of making her own decisions. She came down to sit with him.
With a coy smile that always paid big dividends, she asked, “Dad, can we watch a movie while we eat?”
“You never eat when we do that. And you never watch the movie either. You just do stuff on your phone.”
A fake look of indignation, she said, “Dad! I always watch the beginning and the end. And besides, my phone’s charging in the other room. Please?”
Already moving to the living room, he asked, “What do you wanna watch?”
“A movie you don’t have to skip scenes in. That’s pretty dumb, anyway. Jessica’s parents let her watch R-rated movies.”
“Oh really? Isn’t Jessica the one you said was making-out with some boy behind the school?”
“No! I said some boy wanted to make-out with her, but she thinks he only wants to do it to see if he’s gay or not.”
Brian looked at her perplexed, but he was happy to watch movies with her. He actually loved it. He loved it for the exact reason that happened next.
“Dad, can we just watch Lilo & Stitch?” It was a movie she would’ve never admitted still watching to her friends, but she loved the movie, and every time she requested that movie, or one like it, Neysa appeared to be a six-year-old child in his eyes, and that was his heaven.
“Yep. I like that movie.”
Then they would start doing lines of dialogue that their two favorites characters, Jumba and Pleakley, had together. They watched the movie and enjoyed themselves.
As soon as the movie ended, Neysa went back to her room. Now it was time for Brian to start drinking. He went to the kitchen and poured vodka into a juice drink. He sat in his den and slowly got tipsy. Truth be told, he started drinking after Angelica told him she wanted a divorce. We’ve just grown apart. And you don’t support her passion for dancing, he recalled her saying. It was technically true and also untrue. Brian wasn’t as gung-ho about her desire to be a dancer as Angelica had been. He thought it was too big a risk, in terms of Neysa being able to win a spot in a ballet company.
Angelica had left him for a co-worker named Alex. But it was an amicable divorce. Brian paid child support, and they had visitation all worked out. Naturally, that got mucked up when life hit all three. A few times, Angelica’s boyfriend had to meet Brian to give him Neysa. It’s safe to say that Brian never quite recovered from the divorce. Neysa knew this, but she never brought it up, and she never used it to get her way. At worst, she may’ve had a low-key hostility towards Alex, at least initially.
Brian was reading the news and things of the sort when he briefly recalled Neysa at the age of four. She had had a bad dream. She came to mommy’s and daddy’s room and got into bed with them. She snuggled right between the two of them. It never bothered Brian when that happened. In fact, he loved it most when she did that. To him, it was when the world was the most perfect: mommy, daddy, and child asleep together.
Presently, it was time for Neysa to go to sleep. She had already taken a shower. She snuggled in bed and yelled, “Daddy, I’m going to bed.”
Even as a much younger child, she would say, “Daddy, I’m ready. You gonna come cuddle with me?” Brian would lie down beside her for a bit, then kiss her goodnight, get up, make sure her stuffed animals were in their proper places (she helped), give her a kiss, and then turn off the lights. Now at the age of twelve, when she would say I’m going to bed, she still asked You gonna come cuddle with me? Because that’s exactly what she wanted, and that’s exactly what he did.
After cuddling her, he got up and said, “Good night, my beautiful.” Only occasionally after closing her door would he sit down and get teary while he continued to read on his computer, thinking of an earlier, more happy time.
The next morning, Tuesday, they got up and made ready for the day. Neysa was in middle school, and Brian wanted to drop her off early. If she didn’t decide to take them with her before she left, Neysa made sure that her stuffed toy animals were in