Page 43 of Beside the Rolling Waves
She didn’t hear any crying, so she assumed the babies were still asleep.
He pulled the door open and held it while she walked in.
“Everything good?” she asked in a soft voice as she carried the bags to the counter. She figured he was right. Once the babies were asleep, it didn’t seem to matter how loud they were, but maybe new noises after silence would bother them. Regardless, it seemed prudent to talk softly.
“Everything’s fine. I take it you have more stuff in the car?”
“I do. I can walk out with you. I think if we each make a trip, we’ll bring it all in.”
“I didn’t know if you got any baby paraphernalia that might be pretty big?”
“No. I thought about it, but first of all, Rita’s apartment isn’t that big, and second of all, if we’re moving… I just didn’t know.” It hurt to think about moving away from Rita. Like leaving her apartment meant she was really gone. She had to push those thoughts away, or she wasn’t going to be able to function.
“I talked to my real estate agent while you were gone, and if we want to drive up and take a look at it, we can. I know you have…a funeral to plan, and I can help you with that too. So it’s totally up to you.”
Her heart squeezed. “Did you call the funeral director? Could he meet us here?”
“Yeah. He’s coming at two o’clock,” he said as they reached the car and she clicked the key fob so that the back opened.
She wasn’t used to this whole key fob thing, but the used-car salesman had given her a quick rundown before she’d driven it out of the lot.
There wasn’t much storage space, but she’d been able to get everything in.
“This looks like a lot of stuff for two little kids.”
“I bought lunch, and I bought a few groceries so we had something to eat tonight and tomorrow. I… I seem to be incapable of planning long-term, because it’s just not settled in my mind what’s going to happen.”
“All right. Well, maybe we can get you settled faster. I’ll call the real estate agent and tell him we’ll meet him at the house at five o’clock this evening. That should give us plenty of time to take care of the babies after the funeral director leaves. I don’t think we’ll be able to settle on the house superfast, but considering that it’s a new construction, maybe I’m wrong.”
“Yeah. I knew nothing about it.”
Sometimes people were able to pull strings and make things happen quickly, and Rodney seemed like he was that kind of guy, but he didn’t used to be, and it was odd to think of him that way. So she didn’t say anything.
Eighteen
At five till two, there was a knock on the door. Rodney had Kevin in one arm and a bottle in the other hand.
Becky sat on the couch with Marley.
“I can get it,” he said, scooting to the edge of the recliner. She had already started to get up, but she stopped at his words.
She looked scared. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen Becky scared.
He wanted to go over and hold her. But she hadn’t seemed very receptive to his explanation of why he hadn’t talked to her for the last five years. In hindsight, it was really lame. It sounded terrible as he tried to explain it to her. It was too bad he couldn’t figure out five years ago that it was going to be embarrassing and ridiculous to try to explain that he wanted to look like a big shot in her eyes, so he didn’t tell her that he lost everything and didn’t talk to her for five years.
Of course, at the time, he hadn’t known it was going to take so much time to build back. Actually, he had wondered if he would ever be able to build back. He certainly hadn’t planned to not talk to her for five whole years. It just turned into that as he kept doing better and better financially. He wanted to be huge by the time he got back and confessed what he had done.
It kind of made sense in his mind still, but it still didn’t make sense when it tried to come out of his mouth.
And Becky wasn’t impressed. He didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.
“Hello,” he said as he opened the door to a dude who was dressed in a suit, with no tie, the top button unbuttoned, but he still looked very professional with his hair slicked down and an iPad notebook type thing held in his hand, along with some brochures.
“Hi. I’m Mr. Carson, from Carson’s Funeral Home. I have a two o’clock appointment with Mrs. Becky Rivers?”
“Yeah. You’re at the right place. I’m her…friend.”
Not boyfriend, not fiancé, not husband. He would rather have said any of those words, but even friend felt like an exaggeration.
