*
Last year, she found me lying in the middle of Canary Road in the dead of the night. Canary is the back road to get to and from Copper Springs from Willow Inn, and even though Ellen spends every waking minute at her inn, she lives in Copper Springs. She was coming back from buying supplies in town when she saw my wallowing ass and pulled her truck to stop at an angle, blocking the road.
I was drunk and depressed, and didn’t give a damn anymore about, well, anything. Charity had just died two weeks prior and I was partly to blame. She and I had just broken up but ended up attending the same party one weekend. We were always breaking up and getting back together, but this particular breakup had been rough. I was hurt and moping around, so when a random girl at the party started kissing me I didn’t stop her. But Charity saw us and stormed out of the party, completely drunk, and died in a car crash later that night. So I blamed myself for her leaving that party drunk and setting a series of tragedies in motion.
My life was already a mess. My drunk dad had nearly killed Conner two months prior and sent my life spinning into a never-ending pit of debt and shame, so I’d already been on the brink of a mental breakdown before Charity’s death. But after…
Like I said, I didn’t give a damn.
I’m not sure if I was really trying to kill myself or not, but I certainly didn’t care either way, which is just as bad. I remember lying in the road with a pair of headlights shining on me, irritated that someone had found me and dared to interrupt the pity party I was trying to have in the street.
Ellen stood over me, looking down at my pathetic existence with an arched eyebrow. Her striking good looks caught me off guard for a moment as I gazed up at her. She was wearing a flowy white shirt and had her dark hair loose around her face. She looked like an angel.
I knew she was Pixie’s aunt, but Ellen and I had never spoken before.
“Did you fall?” she asked me, glancing around to see where I had come from. Honestly, I didn’t even know.
I shook my head, which was heavy with alcohol and heartbreak.
She glanced me over. “Are you sober?”
I shook my swimming head again.
Her long hair slipped over her shoulder as she tilted her head and stared into me with her hazel eyes. Her voice softened. “Do you want some company?”
I started to shake my head again, but it was too heavy and I was too exhausted to lie.
Wordlessly, she lay down beside me in the road and looked up. I remember thinking it odd that this grown woman who barely knew me was willing to sprawl out on the dirty road for my benefit, but I was too hammered to ponder her reasons.
She knew about Charity because Pixie and Charity were best friends. And she knew about my dad because his transgressions had been breaking news around town for the past few months. But she didn’t speak a word about either.
We stayed shoulder-to-shoulder for several silent minutes. Just us and the headlights of her truck.
“It’s a beautiful night,” she said after a while, staring up at the sky. “The stars are lovely.”
I stared up at the darkness and all I saw were the things I had lost. My mom. Marcella. Charity. “I don’t see them.”
She slowly nodded. “You will.”
We stayed in that road for who knows how long before I finally pulled myself up with a groan, brushing off the dust and cursing the fog in my head.
“Come on,” she said, helping me to my feet. “It looks like you need a ride home.”
I snorted. In my head, I said, What home? But aloud I think it came out as, “Whamo,” as I stumbled into her.
“Okay.” She caught me and tossed one of my arms over her shoulder so she could guide me to her truck. “I think I have just the place for you to sober up.”
I don’t remember much after that. The next morning I woke up in the clean-smelling sheets of one of Willow Inn’s guest room beds, still wearing my dirty clothes from the night before. I smelled like hell. I looked like hell. But for the first time in several weeks, I didn’t feel like hell.
Later that day, Ellen offered me a job as her stock boy so she wouldn’t have to drive back and forth from Copper Springs to Willow Inn as often. At first, I declined. But she got pretty demanding and, honestly, I needed the money. She offered me free room and board as well, but my prideful ass wasn’t ready to accept total defeat in my own independence yet. But I took the job. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. One of the few.