Chapter 8 - RECLAIMING TERRITORY
The next morning, the sun broke over Morgantown in a brilliant burst of gold and amber.
At 7:30 AM, Adele’s friend Jess—the dental hygienist who had texted me two days earlier—pulled into the driveway in a bright red pickup truck. In the back was a brand-new, unboxed queen-sized mattress and box spring.
When Adele opened the front door, Jess jumped out of the cab and threw her arms around Adele’s neck.
“I heard!” Jess squealed. “Your mom called me last night after the sheriff left! Girl, I brought muscle!”
Behind Jess’s truck came another car. Out stepped two more women from the dental office, carrying rolling paint buckets, brushes, and dropped cloths.
Adele stood on the porch, her jaw agape. “What... what is all this?”
“This is an intervention, sweetie,” Jess laughed, lifting a heavy paint can out of the truck bed. “We are purging the energy of those parasites from this house! We got Sage Green for the master bedroom and Sunset Yellow for your sewing room!”
For the next eight hours, the bungalow was transformed into a whirlwind of sisterhood and renewal.
We hauled Roberta’s heavy orthopedic mattress down to the curb for bulk trash pickup. We set up Adele’s new mattress. We repainted the primary bedroom a soothing, beautiful sage green that made the honey-colored hardwood floors glow like amber.
We brought Adele’s sewing machine out from behind the hallway wall and reassembled her desk beneath the second-bedroom window where Todd’s gaming monitors had been. We hung her watercolor paintings back on the wall.
By 4:00 PM, the smell of fresh paint and lavender cleaner filled the house.
Adele stood in the doorway of her master bedroom, looking at her neatly made bed, her clothes hung neatly in her closet, and her favorite photograph of the two of us in Asheville sitting on the nightstand.
Her posture was different. Her shoulders were pulled back. Her head was held high. The timid, apologizing woman of yesterday was gone.
Suddenly, Adele’s phone buzzed on the dresser.
She walked over and picked it up. I watched her face closely.
“Is it Cliff?” I asked.
Adele looked at the screen. “He’s texted me fourteen times. He’s begging now. He says his mother is staying in a cheap motel and her back is convulsing. He says he realizes he made a mistake and that he wants to go to couples counseling.”
I held my breath, waiting to see what she would do.
Adele looked at the text message for a long moment. Then, she let out a short, quiet laugh.
She tapped her screen three times.
Block Contact.
May you like
She turned to me, her face glowing in the afternoon light. “I’m closing the joint bank account tomorrow morning, Mom. And then I’m filing for a formal restraining order.”
“That’s my girl,” I whispered.
