Family Matters

Chapter 53

A few more weeks had passed with Liz slowly accepting her new situation and her anger slowly dying down a bit more every day.

She was able to think about Joe without her pulse rushing up to 180 and she even found herself wondering about what had actually happened between him and Zoe. How far did they go? What did they do? Where did they do it? How did they do it? Liz had raised her eyebrows when another question popped up in her mind: Did they use contraception? Could Zoe be pregnant maybe? She shook her head to erase that thought but it never really left her mind.

One Wednesday morning while Liz was getting ready for work, she found herself in a surprisingly good mood although she had a long meeting about her project set for that day. She usually hated that because she wouldn't be able to concentrate on anything else before and afterwards, so she thought about getting to work just in time for the meeting and leave straight after to work a bit from home but something inside her made her get up at six thirty that morning and get ready to be in the office at seven thirty.

She put her purse on the passenger's seat of her car and got in but before she started the engine, she decided it was time to listen to some music. After all, she hadn't listened to a single song in two months which was really atypical for her, when she usually had music playing 24/7. She connected her phone with the car radio and started one of her playlists when she instantly regretted her decision.

Am I more than you bargained for yet?

I've been dying to tell you anything you wanna hear cause that's just who I am this week

Liz was staring at her radio thinking about either throwing her phone out of the window or just ripping the radio out of the bracket altogether. Instead, she took a deep breath and told herself that it was just a song and that she had loved it long before she had even known Joe and she simply had to remember her emo teenager years instead of the car ride and her screeching that made Joe realize he loved her. So, Liz flipped her hair back and pulled backwards out of her garage then hit the road to get to work. To her own surprise she even joined in during the last chorus, it was the first time in weeks she had been - let's call it singing – and she actually felt surprisingly relieved by it. To relieve more of the tension and leftover anger in her body she added two songs to her queue and sang her heart out to Christina Aguilera's Fighter and Britney Spears' Stronger.

She was about to add another song when her playlist resumed, and a choir echoed in the car.

Is this the real life?

Is this just fantasy?

Liz' grip around the steering wheel tightened but then she shook her head and remembered that this wasn't her and Joe's song, but her and her mother's. So, she pushed away the thoughts of Joe and her at the concert and instead remembered the embarrassing moment when she was home alone, sitting on the couch and belting out Bohemian Rhapsody with her headphones in and hearing her mother's voice afterwards saying, "I didn't know you knew all the lyrics to this." Turned out her mom had come home from work earlier and brought takeout dinner. Liz had to smile when she thought back to that moment as embarrassing as it was at first, it was one of the funniest and clearest memories she had of her mom, most of her childhood was a blur because she was afraid to be crushed by the grief.

Liz had just parked her car in her usual spot when the next song started, and she once again stared at her radio. "This is getting really creepy," she murmured to herself before turning off the engine thus the radio and cutting off Mandy Moore in the middle of the first verse.

She grabbed her purse and got out of the car and as she was walking over to enter the building Mindy had caught up with her.

"Good morning," she said with a smile, "You look great today."