Page 1 of Spring Showers

CHAPTER1

Thandie swerved into the left lane, narrowly avoiding the crates of strawberries falling from the back of a pickup truck just ahead. Plump red globes spilled across the highway, slurping under her tires. The wheel wells of Thandie’s car would be sticky for days. In her rearview mirror, bright green trees covered in cotton candy flowers whizzed by and she saw the truck driver finally pull to the side of the road. The driver’s arm stretched out from the window and waved the traffic around.

“Whoa. Are you alright?” Davis asked through Thandie’s phone speaker, since her car was too old to have bluetooth.

Thandie had nearly forgotten he was on the line. Why she had even answered his call after all these months was a question she would dig into later, but for now, she wanted nothing more than to find a reason to hang up on him. But his concern for her safety seemed genuine, so she didn’t just yet.

“It looks like there was a murder on this highway,” she said with a laugh.

“Ew, are you serious?” he said, not having grasped her sarcasm.

“Not an actual murder,” she said and caught a glimpse of her own blue eyes rolling in the reflection of the rearview. “A truck spilled strawberries all over the highway. It’s red and splattered like blood.”

Davis gave a humorless giggle. “I get it. The strawberries smashed, and it looks like roadkill or something. Funny.”

Thandie hated that she always had to explain her jokes to him. It hadn’t bothered her at first, but as their relationship progressed, he became more serious and she...Well, she would self-censor her banter before even saying her amusing thoughts out loud to him.

Thandie changed lanes back to the right. “Listen, Davis, my exit is coming up in a minute and I’ll need to concentrate on the directions.”

“Where are you heading?”

As far from you as I can get. “I’m going to start my new job near my friend JB, who I know from college. Do you remember me talking about her?”

His silence was his answer.

“Davis, I need to go.”

“Wait,” he said. “When can I see you?”

“Why would we need to see each other again?” Her words cracked as they came out of her lips with more hurt than she wanted him to be aware of. “Or did you forget what you did to me a few months ago?”

“Thandie, of course I didn’t forget...I was just...” He paused, and she thought for a moment that he might actually be honest with her for once. “I had other things to take care of.”

“Other things named Bianca?” Heat climbed up her neck. She tucked a stray brown curl behind her ear and took a deep breath before exploding at him. “You had real things to do. You had our rehearsal dinner. Oh, and that thing the next day. What was it again? Oh yes, our wedding!”

“Thandie, darling?—”

“Don’t you ‘Thandie darling’ me, Davis Mothan.”

“I can tell that you’re still upset?—”

“That you deserted me the night before our wedding? You didn’t show up at the rehearsal and then you called me that night, from Vegas no less, with no explanation. Huh, I wonder why anyone would be upset about that.” Thandie removed her pink baseball cap and threw it to the seat beside her, where it landed in a pile of granola bar wrappers and empty water bottles. “Taking your call was a mistake. I need to go. I’m at my exit.”

“Thandie,” his tender pleading was tinged with something that sounded like remorse, but for Thandie, it was too little. “Will you please at least talk to me about it? I made a mistake, and you need to stop running at some point.”

“You made it clear that I’m no longer your concern. Goodbye, Davis,” she said and ended the call.

The notion of going back to him made her body shake. While he had slithered away back to Seattle, she had been on a seven-month-long journey eastward. Even if she made it to the ends of the North American continent, it wouldn’t be far enough away from the man who had broken her heart.

The exit ramp narrowed, and the roadway dissolved into a rough grit. The car’s tires skidded across the loose ground as she came to a stop sign. Looking both ways, she saw the crossroad was clear, and she creeped straight ahead. Around a hairpin turn, a weathered, gray, covered bridge with variegated vines and purple wisteria flowers dripping over the arched entrance came into view. If she hadn’t been so antsy to get to The Foundry, she might have stopped and enjoyed the view of the quiet stream below. The riverbanks, painted with tiny wildflowers, stretched out in both directions beneath her.

Thandie took in as much of the lush scenery as she could while she inched her orange Geo Metro over the creaking road planks. On the other side of the covered bridge, the road became paved again, and a sign ahead showed the way toward Elizabethtown and Christmas Cove. With her blinker set, she made for the Cove.

The view out of her window was nothing like back home, where corn stalks and grain silos dominated the horizon. This countryside, with its rolling hills and white steeples dotting the fields of flowers and newly green trees, felt like the change she desperately craved. A change that she hoped would take her mind off of all she had lost seven months ago when Davis selfishly derailed her future.

As though the universe read her thoughts, a church came into view as she rounded a bend in the road. On the top steps, just outside a carved wooden door, dozens of people gathered dressed in suits and pastel-colored dresses. At the bottom of the steps, an arch was decorated with hundreds of white and pink roses. Thandie could almost smell the flowers’ essential oils drifting into the air.

Though the moment was a happy one for the lucky couple, whoever they were, sadness welled inside her heart at having missed out on having the wedding of her dreams, and she wiped her damp eyes. The church disappeared behind her car and she wondered if she would see herself wanting to get married ever again.

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