Promise Me Anthology Read Free Page A

chartered
to cast his ashes in the Rocky Mountains. I agreed that it was what
he’d wanted. After it was over, there was nothing really more to
say, or so I thought. But his mother had said plenty on the trip
back to the landing pad, about how I’d used her son for his money,
how he’d died because I’d let him climb that Alaskan mountain,
about how I should give up my false grief now that I’d gotten what
I wanted. Some of what she said cut me to the bone, before I tuned
her out, knowing she was grieving just as I was.
    It didn’t really hit me until I was on the
plane home. I was a widow now. That life Brennan had hoped to build
with me was over at the close of our first chapter. The rest of the
story now fell to me to finish. Where the hell was I going to
start?
    * * * *
    I cleaned out Brennan’s clothes immediately
on my return, purging our bedroom of them and then all traces of
him from the house. My wedding rings I removed and put in my
jewelry box. As much as it was painful, feeling a pang every time I
glanced at one of those formerly filled spaces, it did make it
easier to get through each day. Because that was all I was doing,
really...getting through each day in the hopes that one day I
wouldn’t feel like I was going through the motions of living.
    The pets helped, of course. They were
constant company without judgment.
    My new job also helped. When a part time
position at a metal fabrication shop was advertised in the local
Pennysaver, I applied for the job. At first, the owner acted as
though he thought the job was going to be too dirty for a woman,
that he wasn’t sure I could take it. But after I explained that my
inclination lay more in machinery and hard work than staying at
home baking pies—even if I was handy at that, too—he agreed to hire
me.
    The work was tough at first, as I’d had no
experience working in industry before, much less knowledge of all
the governmental rules and regulations that required compliance.
With a lot of research and help from the local Department of Labor,
I rapidly built a rudimentary network of safety and health
programs, and began enforcing them. At first, the guys on the floor
didn’t respect me. But with my persistence—and more than a few
batches of my special chocolate chip cookies—I slowly won them
over.
    My mother and stepfather liked my changes in
lifestyle. The only trouble was that for them, the modifications
weren’t encompassing enough. “You’re by yourself too much,” became
my mother’s most used comment. That morphed to, “we want you to be
completely happy,” a.k.a, “you need a man.” When I challenged that
for its sexist attitude, she began saying, “it’s dangerous for a
woman to live alone. So many things can happen.” Insisting that I
was safer as a single woman in the country than a single woman in
the city, fell on deaf ears. To shut her up, I finally contacted a
local shooting range, purchased a used .38, and got some training
to handle it safely. My stepfather was pleased with my interest in
self-preservation, buying me a side leg holster like Lara Croft’s
that Christmas. I admitted that having the gun that winter did make
me feel braver about being there alone, even if I never used it
except in target practice. While I had used my old shotgun before
to scare away trespassers, there was something about having a
handgun that made me feel more self-sufficient.
    That first spring, I learned how to start my
chainsaw myself, with a lot of swearing plus trial and error
seasoned with some bitter tears of frustration. As I slowly gained
upper body strength working with wood, starting the chainsaw became
easier. But I did keep my promise to Brennan, either asking my
friend Kat up or my mother to help me when I used the chainsaw. My
pets had only me now. I wasn’t going to risk an accident claiming
my life, too.
    That was the only thing that really bothered
me: most of my friends had moved on. Brennan hadn’t made a lot