Promise Me Anthology (2 page)

Brennan called just like he said he would.
But I had terrible dreams that first night, waking from nightmare
after nightmare. I spent the next day in a fog, getting up only to
walk our two German Shepherds, Ghost and Darkness.

They were really my dogs, but Brennan had
known them their whole life, from our selection of them as puppies
to their gawky adolescence to their sleek adult selves. Ghost was
white as snow—so long as he stayed clear of mud—and Darkness was
black as onyx. She was just as glossy, too, when she wasn’t mud
covered from digging holes looking for mice. I’d done most of their
training myself, and they knew several commands beyond the usual
“sit,” “down”, “no,” and “stay.”

Our two cats, Jessica and Cavity, had also
been mine. They were cats I’d spent my college years with, back
when I’d lived with my mother. After she’d gotten remarried to my
stepfather Chris, I’d sort of inherited them. When she’d found me a
home in the country only a few miles from hers, I’d jumped at the
chance. I’d always felt like I didn’t belong in the city, with its
obsession on trim lawns and nosy neighbours. Now Brennan and I had
our own place. We were building a wonderful life here. It was
normal that the first years would be a little rocky.

I smiled, then got on my laptop computer,
paging through to the classifieds. It was past time to look for a
job. Brennan kept telling me that there wasn’t any rush, that he
was happy being the breadwinner. But I knew that was just another
strike his family held against me. They didn’t understand that I’d
spent the last year painting, sanding, spackling, laying floor
tiles, and doing other remodeling to our new home; they only saw
that he worked a job and I didn’t have one. Now that most of the
refurbishing work was done inside on our new house, I was going to
find something to bring in some money. I’d held a full-time job
after college, and I had my chemistry degree. There had to be a lot
of jobs I was suited for.

* * * *

The clock struck ten, chiming. I blinked,
then remembered I was on the couch waiting for Brennan to call.
Rain was pouring down from the noise on the roof.

Better check the cellar.
In heavy
rain, the cellar always had a little water seep up through the
floor cracks. Brennan had been down there moving boxes when he’d
packed a few days ago. If he’d forgotten to move things back, there
might be problems.

I roused a disgruntled Jessica from her spot
on my lap, then walked downstairs. There was a little spot of water
near the stairs, but nothing else. Relieved, I headed back upstairs
and let the dogs out. With a flurry of ferocious barking, they
descended on the plastic doghouse in the backyard.

“Hey! Stop!” I yelled as I ran toward them,
wincing as the rain rapidly soaked my pyjamas. The dogs backed
away, and I peered into the house, expecting a rat or a rabbit.
Instead a forlorn white and grey cat stared up at me in utter fear,
shivering.

I stripped off my robe, then wrapped it
around the cat, which hissed and swiped at me. With difficulty, I
let the dogs back into the house, then managed to get the cat to
the cellar before it broke free of my arms. It promptly ran into
the darkness at the far end of the basement, disappearing beneath
some boxes.

“Asher,” I said tiredly, standing. “You must
be blessed by God. You lived up to your name, facing down the dogs
like that. What possessed you to decide to finally join the family
tonight of all nights?”

There was no answer. I trooped upstairs,
gathered some food, water, and litter for an extra litter box, then
set out my offerings with a small plate of wet food. Asher came out
as I was working, watching me.

Brennan and I had noticed the stray cat
living in the barn when we’d first moved in late last fall, but all
efforts to trap her had been foiled. We’d been feeding her since
then, and calling her Asher. “I’m going to have to go get your
heated bed from the barn tomorrow,” I told her. “I’m glad you came
in. Brennan’s going to be upset he missed it.”

Asher mewed at me, the sound almost inaudible
even in silence. She came over and sniffed my fingers, then bolted
away again.

* * * *

I woke in the stillness of dawn, the
half-moon windows above me pinkish with the rays of the rising sun.
I shifted, then groaned at the sudden dull ache within my lower
torso. “God how I hate my fucking period,” I muttered, staggering
to the bathroom. After cleaning up my mess, I got an early start on
the day, knowing that it was useless to try to sleep. I was just
downing two aspirin with breakfast when the phone rang.

It was the right area code for Andy, but the
wrong number. Worried, I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Sarelle?” a female voice said. “It’s
Susan.”

“Hi,” I said as friendly as I could for not
knowing who Susan was. “Can I help you?”

“There’s been an accident.”

“There wasn’t a boat,” I replied foggily. I
flushed, realizing how dumb I sounded. There had been a dream last
night about a boat accident. I was standing at the edge of the
water, looking down at the lapping waves.

“You need to come out here,” Susan said.
“I’ve called the airport, and they’re holding a ticket for you to
Wyoming—”

“What happened?” I asked. “Did Brennan get
hurt?”

“It’s your duty to be out here,” she said,
then hung up.

My shock at her abruptness cut through the
last of my cobwebs. Angrily, I pushed *69, then 1. After a few
rings, a woman answered.

“I’m not flying anywhere until I know what
happened,” I said angrily. “Do you hear me, Susan? Now who in the
hell are you and what is going on?”

“Your husband died along with my soon to be
ex,” Susan said grimly. “They fell off a cliff on Mount Foraker.
Brennan’s family is holding a funeral as soon as possible. If you
want to be part of it, get the hell out here!”

My tongue felt like it was stuck to the roof
of my mouth. “Why did you get me a ticket?”

“Andy asked me to,” Susan said. “He was found
alive, and he asked that I get you a ticket. He said you’d never
come out otherwise and that Brennan would have wanted you
here.”

I put the phone down, hearing it click. But
the sound had lost meaning.

In my dream, there had been a boat. Brennan
had sailed off in it. And I had come down to the water’s edge to
greet him and found only wooden shards floating on the water.

I would have stayed there for days, if the
phone hadn’t rung again. This time it was the Alaskan police,
calling to advise me that my husband of exactly one year and a few
days was dead, victim of a broken neck.

* * * *

I arrived in Wyoming hot, jet-lagged, and
exhausted. After renting a car, I found my way to my in-laws home.
The place was packed. I rang the doorbell. A woman answered. It
took me a moment to identify her as Brennan’s mother. She looked so
worn.

“You made it,” she said politely. “Please
come in.”

“Where is he?” I asked, coming inside.

“Coming in a few hours,” she said, guiding me
to the couch. I sat, looking around at all the people chatting.
“That’s my knitting club, my bridge club, and the local Lionesses
club,” she said, her tone containing a note of pride. “I’m very
active in my community.”

My eyes narrowed. “Where is Brennan? I want
to collect him and take him home. I have to make arrangements.”

“You don’t have to do anything of the sort,”
she assured me. “We’re his family, Sar. We’ve got it under
control.”

I looked at her with hostility. “He’s not
staying out here with you.”

She stared right back. “He wanted to be
cremated and scattered out here in the mountains. With all your
death arrangements, I thought you both went over your last
wishes.”

I had never hated anyone more than in that
moment. “He’s coming home with me.”

“No, he’s not,” she said coolly, handing me a
paper. “This is his will. In it he stipulated what I just told you
quite clearly.”

I snatched the paper out of her hand and read
it. Yes, it was Brennan’s will, the one we’d signed a year ago.
He’d left his worldly possessions to me, along with his SUV.
Written on the bottom in longhand was a paragraph long notation in
his handwriting, asking to be cremated, and “cast to the winds.” It
was his handwriting, no question. But that didn’t mean I was going
to roll over for her. I stood up. Holding the will, I walked to the
nearest phone and called the police.

* * * *

All told, it took me a week to do the
necessary paperwork, get death certificates, collect Brennan’s
things, and board a plane for my home. My now-estranged in-laws got
their way, in the end. I was there on the helicopter they chartered
to cast his ashes in the Rocky Mountains. I agreed that it was what
he’d wanted. After it was over, there was nothing really more to
say, or so I thought. But his mother had said plenty on the trip
back to the landing pad, about how I’d used her son for his money,
how he’d died because I’d let him climb that Alaskan mountain,
about how I should give up my false grief now that I’d gotten what
I wanted. Some of what she said cut me to the bone, before I tuned
her out, knowing she was grieving just as I was.

It didn’t really hit me until I was on the
plane home. I was a widow now. That life Brennan had hoped to build
with me was over at the close of our first chapter. The rest of the
story now fell to me to finish.
Where the hell was I going to
start?

* * * *

I cleaned out Brennan’s clothes immediately
on my return, purging our bedroom of them and then all traces of
him from the house. My wedding rings I removed and put in my
jewelry box. As much as it was painful, feeling a pang every time I
glanced at one of those formerly filled spaces, it did make it
easier to get through each day. Because that was all I was doing,
really...getting through each day in the hopes that one day I
wouldn’t feel like I was going through the motions of living.

The pets helped, of course. They were
constant company without judgment.

My new job also helped. When a part time
position at a metal fabrication shop was advertised in the local
Pennysaver, I applied for the job. At first, the owner acted as
though he thought the job was going to be too dirty for a woman,
that he wasn’t sure I could take it. But after I explained that my
inclination lay more in machinery and hard work than staying at
home baking pies—even if I was handy at that, too—he agreed to hire
me.

The work was tough at first, as I’d had no
experience working in industry before, much less knowledge of all
the governmental rules and regulations that required compliance.
With a lot of research and help from the local Department of Labor,
I rapidly built a rudimentary network of safety and health
programs, and began enforcing them. At first, the guys on the floor
didn’t respect me. But with my persistence—and more than a few
batches of my special chocolate chip cookies—I slowly won them
over.

My mother and stepfather liked my changes in
lifestyle. The only trouble was that for them, the modifications
weren’t encompassing enough. “You’re by yourself too much,” became
my mother’s most used comment. That morphed to, “we want you to be
completely happy,” a.k.a, “you need a man.” When I challenged that
for its sexist attitude, she began saying, “it’s dangerous for a
woman to live alone. So many things can happen.” Insisting that I
was safer as a single woman in the country than a single woman in
the city, fell on deaf ears. To shut her up, I finally contacted a
local shooting range, purchased a used .38, and got some training
to handle it safely. My stepfather was pleased with my interest in
self-preservation, buying me a side leg holster like Lara Croft’s
that Christmas. I admitted that having the gun that winter did make
me feel braver about being there alone, even if I never used it
except in target practice. While I had used my old shotgun before
to scare away trespassers, there was something about having a
handgun that made me feel more self-sufficient.

That first spring, I learned how to start my
chainsaw myself, with a lot of swearing plus trial and error
seasoned with some bitter tears of frustration. As I slowly gained
upper body strength working with wood, starting the chainsaw became
easier. But I did keep my promise to Brennan, either asking my
friend Kat up or my mother to help me when I used the chainsaw. My
pets had only me now. I wasn’t going to risk an accident claiming
my life, too.

That was the only thing that really bothered
me: most of my friends had moved on. Brennan hadn’t made a lot of
friends; he hadn’t been in this part of the country long enough.
His family was out West, and they’d not spoken to me since his
funeral, not even at Christmas. I’d never had a lot of friends, but
I’d had enough at my former job to give me a big send off when I
quit to marry Brennan. None of them had contacted me since I’d left
there, except Kat. I’d never had many friends in college; I’d been
too busy studying. At my new job, most of the guys were married; I
didn’t think their wives would appreciate a new widow trying to
strike up a friendship with their husbands, even an innocent one.
Outside my mother and Chris, I had no other close family. That left
religious and local associations, and my neighbors.

I’d never been big on associations of any
kind, and I preferred that God’s relationship with me be a private
one of prayer. So it was time to meet my neighbors.

I made friends with Henry, who lived to the
north of me, did construction and plowing, and offered me the use
of his quarry behind my home for target shooting. I forged a
partnership with a local farmer, who agreed to farm ten acres of my
land in return for helping me manage other jobs too big for me to
handle. And I met Flora and her grandson Ken. The former was to
become in the last year of her life one of my best friends.