Pleasing Mindy

Pleasing Mindy - Chapter 4

Mindy ripped off her gloves as she bolted through the front door of her mother's house and switched on the light. She dropped her gloves and her backpack on the floor and sprinted across the living room, paying little attention to the unstable floor rattling beneath her. She blew air into her palms and rubbed them together before holding them as close to the radiator as she possibly could. Her fingers were frozen numb, as were her toes, she realized, as she clumsily toed off her sneakers and brought her sock feet closer to the heat.

It was early February, two months since her heat had given out, and she didn't know how much more of that cold car she could take. Thank goodness, her mother's house sat across the street from the elementary school, so driving her kids around was limited to two times a week when she took Kyle to swimming lessons and Brittany to ballet.

Although they complained about the cold all during the drive, they nonetheless enjoyed attending their classes in the luxurious Granite Falls facilities she'd enrolled them in after she'd begun working at Arabella. She was grateful to still be able to afford to keep them there. Those classes were the highlights of their week.

Mindy's hopes for her children's future had risen to an all-time high when she'd moved into her own apartment in Granite Falls. For once, she'd felt in control of her life and proud that she was able to provide a home for her children and buy them decent clothes instead of dressing them in hand-me-downs from her friends.

For the first time in their lives, the kids had a bedroom to themselves—big enough to accommodate two twin beds—instead of sharing a small room with her. She'd promised them that they'd have their own individual bedrooms one day soon after Galen, who'd been living with her at the time, had assured her that they would be a real family once the trial was over.

Her cheeks burned with humiliation. Whatever had she, a girl from a trailer park, been thinking when she'd dared to dream so high, dared to believe that she could be as lucky as Tashi and move up into the ranks of high society by marrying a man from that circle? She'd been desperate for love, had longed to be accepted and appreciated, and wanted to find a father for her children so badly that she'd allowed herself to be sucked in by Galen's empty promises and outright lies.

Anger ate at Mindy as she recalled the difficult period immediately following Galen's departure. Every morning and every night for weeks on end, Kyle and Brittany had asked where he was and when was he coming back. She'd truthfully told them that she simply did not know. Eventually, she'd had to begin the odious task of trying to return all their lives to a pre-Galen state of existence and reinstating her kids' daily routine to a one-parent home. She'd had to reassure them that they could trust her to be a constant in their lives, that she would never leave them.

She'd promised them that they were safe and that nothing else in their world would change. But she'd had to eat that promise when her mom was hospitalized for weeks after falling in her bathroom and ended up breaking her collarbone, dislocating a shoulder, and twisting her ankle. With her brother, Billy, married and living in the Midwest, Mindy had the responsibility of taking care of her mother, whom she thought would be back on her feet in a few weeks.

But when the weeks turned into months of running back and forth between the two towns—sometimes two and three times in one day—Mindy knew she was in over her head. Billy wasn't around to pick up Kyle and Brittany from school and take them to their extra-curricular activities while she worked, or to watch them while she attended night school. Something had to give, and since she lived on the third floor of her apartment complex with no elevator service, bringing her mother to live with her until she recovered was out of the question. She'd had no other choice but to give up her apartment in Granite Falls. Luckily, her lease was about to expire, so she was under no legal obligation to pay for a year.