You're Still the One Read Free

west of his hundred-year-old, two-story, white, run-down home the first day I explored the property. There were two bullet holes in the house. One in the floor, one in the wall. I wasn’t surprised. He probably put them there in a blast of self-righteous anger.
    I zipped up one row and down the next, steaming mad. Why would he buy a dilapidated house and land with an apple orchard and leave it to me? Was he mocking me to the very end? He knew I loved apples. He had seen me eat them by the dozen. He knew why I ate them by the dozen.
    “Spike me in the heart and twist it, Dad,” I whispered into the orchard. Then I decided not to whisper. I would not let him smother my voice any longer. I picked up one apple after another and pelted them through the rows, swearing every single time an apple hit a tree. “You jerk . . . you were never a dad . . . you were horrible to Mom . . . you never even hugged me . . . and now you have an apple orchard? Really? An apple orchard?”
    I threw those dead apples until I was sweating, my hair falling all over my face, my chest heaving. I started kicking the apples on the ground, sending them flying. When I was totally exhausted I collapsed against a tree, an apple tree from my stupid dad, and sobbed.
    I sobbed for him, for us, for what he’d done to our family. I sobbed because I was so angry. So frustrated and resentful. And guilty. I felt guilt. He didn’t deserve for me to feel guilty, but I did.
     
     
    I composed the letter later that night.
    I sent it to the top of the ladder.
    Hopefully a wrong would be righted.
    She shouldn’t be allowed to give people nervous breakdowns.
     
     
    At dusk, my bandages tight on my thigh, I limped out to my dad’s creaking deck and stared at the orchard as the sun sank down over the blue-gray hills in the distance. Margaret and Bob, my dad’s brown and white furry mutts, played together in the grass. Marvin, a gold cat, and Spot the Cat, a black cat who had no spots, perched on the rail of the deck, side by side. I saw Spunky Joy the horse in the field, she neighed at me, and I rolled my eyes.
    “Hey you, menopause horse!” She swished her tail. “You gave me a bunch of stitches. Do you know that? Cool it with the hormonal swings and we’ll get along better.”
    She neighed again.
    “I don’t like men, either, Spunky Joy, but that’s no excuse for your hoof coming up and kicking me in the thigh.”
    She neighed.
    “Yep. Women are better on their own, I agree with you there.” I shook my head at the irony here. From retail executive supervising hundreds of employees, wearing outfits that cost hundreds of dollars and heels so high I could have broken an ankle if I fell, to an apple orchard, farm animals, and a sagging house where I sat on a deck and talked back to a horse.
    The sky was a painting full of shining colors folding over the mountains. I swallowed more pain-reliever pills. I hate taking medicine, but I did it anyhow. Without it my bruised and cut leg would be throbbing.
    I thought of seeing Jace at the hospital, letting him handle my thigh, talking to him again . . . and I smiled. Then I cried, some of the tears I’d dammed up forever spilling over. I cried as other memories slipped back in about a trailer awash in fear and domination and a young man in a lake who hugged me close.
    Next I thought of the deranged man who had burst through the emergency room doors wielding a ferocious temper.
     
     
    “I thought you were working for Mackie’s Designs, Allie.” Jace made a couple of final stitches, his hands sure, capable.
    “I was. I was fired.”
    Jace’s eyebrows rose. “You’re kidding.”
    “No.” Fired and my dad died. In one day.
    “Why were you fired?”
    “My boss pushed me to the edge of the cliff and I decided to jump instead of continuing to work for her. I told her what I thought of her and the way she treated other people. She didn’t appear to like my input, and I left with a pair of designer