Breaking Down

Chapter 4

4

Tyler

The girl was crazy.

And yet I couldn’t get her out of my mind.

I had left the clinic for a quick lunch break—at almost three in the afternoon—when I found her outside. At first, I thought she was lost, then I thought she had a pet and was bringing it in for an appointment. Not in a million years had I expected what she had proposed.

Marry her? For money?

Granted, the money would be a life saver. I seriously needed the money, but this was my life too. I was already sacrificing too much of myself. I had never really considered marriage before, much less in the last couple of years, and I certainly wouldn’t marry some random girl, no matter how rich she was.

I barely ate during my lunch break. And hours later, when I dragged my feet inside my apartment and threw my jacket over the back of the couch, I was still thinking about her. It was absolutely crazy. That was why I was still thinking about it. I had never had something like that happen to me before and I was still shocked. I was still amused.

I looked around my apartment. So pathetic. We had never been rich, far from it, but we had always had a nice townhouse in a nice neighborhood with a nice backyard. Now, I lived in a crappy two-bedroom apartment with cracking walls, rotting carpet, and a heady stench of mold. The appliances in the kitchen looked thirty years old, as did the bathtub in the bathroom.

Tired, I grabbed a frozen dinner from the freezer and threw it in the microwave. Once more, I would sit alone at the dining table and pretend it was a steak with loaded mashed potatoes. Or a four-cheese fettuccine. Or some chicken marsala. Anything other than a frozen dinner that tasted of cardboard. But it was the best I could manage with the little money I had, and with how tired I was. I hadn’t cooked in … I didn’t even know when the last time was.

As I inhaled my dinner, my eyes found the stack of letters on top of the side table in the living room—the same stack I had been trying to avoid for the last month, and the one that grew each time I opened the mailbox. A mistake, of course, but the thing was always overflowing. I had no choice but to pick the letters up. Then, I ignored them when they were in here.

But I couldn’t sweep the mess under the rug forever. One day or another, I would have to face it all.

With a sigh, I stood and took my plate to the sink. After washing it and setting it on the drying rack, I grabbed a beer and sat on the couch beside the stack. I stared at it, took a swig of my beer, and instead of doing the responsible thing, I swiped the remote control from the coffee table and turned on the TV. There was nothing I wanted to watch, really, but it was better than staring at the walls. Besides, I had to go to bed soon because I had an early shift tomorrow.

I turned on The Walking Dead—other than being about zombies, I had no idea what the show was about and didn’t really care—and pretended that, just for a few hours, everything was normal. Everything was okay.

I would leave the worry, the tension, the deep hole in my gut for tomorrow.