Dumped!

Dumped (18)

RECAP:

“Can I ask you a question?” I asked. It was  a long shot, but I had to at least try.

“Shoot”, she answered, coming out of her reverie.

“Um . . . do you . . .who’s Lauren?”

She looked taken aback, as her eyes widened slightly.

“How do you know about Lauren?” she said, quietly, with a confused and slightly worried frown.

“Um . . . I kind of met her mom”, I answered.

She sighed and leaned back in her seat, staring into space for what seemed like forever. I was beginning to give up on getting an answer, when she said – so quietly, I’d hardly heard it – “She was Jeremy’s wife.”

18

I stared at her dumbfounded. I couldn’t move an inch, from the shock that enveloped me at that moment.

“Excuse me?” I managed to murmur.

She looked up at me sadly. “They were married. For about . . . seven hours.”

“What happened?”

“She died three years ago.”

That explained a lot about Jeremy. A whole lot!

“How?” I whispered. I really couldn’t do more than that.

“Car accident. They’d just left the wedding, and they were headed off to the airport for their honeymoon in Maui. They’d just got to the intersection before LAX, when, all of a sudden, this other Mercedes comes out of nowhere; the impact was directly on Lauren’s side. Turns out, the driver in the other car had just had a heart attack. Some other driver who’d been driving by took them to the hospital, but she had died instantly. I will never forget the looks on everyone’s faces when Jeremy walked into our hotel suite that night, covered in blood. He didn’t say one word, he just went into the shower, grabbed his stuff, and left. We only found out because Lauren’s mom called our mom.

He pretty much became a different person after that; he closed himself off; never hung out, hardly ever talked to anyone – I mean, even Brad; he always wore this blank expression – which I think was to hide the pain. And he spent every waking minute at the bar down the street from his apartment. None of us could begin to understand what he was going through, so we just let him mourn. It was the worst time ever!

Through that entire phase, the craziest thing, that freaked everyone out, was the speeding. I mean, Deana, the speed! He got arrested nearly every day, and whenever he crashed, he’d just get a new car. It was horrible. I think he just wanted to die; to see her again or something. Everyone was just torn up about it and we tried to talk to him, but it was like talking to a brick wall.

Then, about a year later, our dad passed, and I was devastated; I was so close to him! We always got along better than he and Jeremy ever did; I don’t know why. So, I guess Jeremy didn’t want my mom to have to look after me, as well as herself, so he moved to New York with me, and he just worked from there. At first, it was all silent dinners, and no conversation whatsoever, but then, one day, he said, ‘Good morning’. And that was it.

We just escalated from there. He drank less, but he slept around a lot. All the girls he slept with, he never learned their names, never had meaningful conversations, never stayed over, never called them. He was such a jerk! I think he just hated the entire world, and everything in it – he needed to blame someone, other than himself, so he blamed everyone else. The only people he wasn’t a jerk to were me, my mom, Brad and Greg. Everyone else – co-workers, other family members, people on the street – he was just nasty to.