Chapter 5

“Where is she?! Where is my daughter?!” Cherry’s mother began interrogating me.

I remained calm and said, “She is where she is supposed to be: she is at school.”

Wishing to avoid creating a scene for the neighbors to gossip about, I motioned to the other doors close by and invited the clearly angry and worried woman inside to talk. I had a few questions of my own for her (like how she knew where to find my apartment, for one). She looked at the other apartment doors and understood what I was saying and agreed to come inside.

I turned to unlock my door and she couldn’t help but comment about the fresh injury from the day before.

“What the hell happened to you?” she asked without a hint of care to her tone.

It took a second for the question to register and make sense to me, but once it did, I just said, “Come in and I’ll tell you about it.”

Cherry’s mom entered and I closed the door before offering her something to drink. She turned it down flatly without even saying ‘thanks’ for the offer. Without skipping a beat, she continued giving me the third degree; a flood of questions pouring from her without waiting for answers from me. I was sizing her up subconsciously.

She asked, “What are you doing with my daughter? How did you even meet her? Where did she sleep in here? Did you sleep with her? Don’t you think you are too old for her? How old are you anyway?

There were more, but these are the questions that really resonated with me. I continued my evaluation of her as she continued the questioning and it became clear that I needed to be careful of what I told her because I was on extremely thin ice.

Questions of my own began forming in my head: ‘why is she so upset that her daughter spent the night here? Even if she is still in school, she is still an adult, right? Then again, could that be what Cherry was trying to tell me about this morning? I decided to be slightly ‘less than honest’ with the answers if she ever decided to shut up long enough for me to answer one of them.

Eventually she began repeating questions and I held up a hand to signal her to take a breather. Remarkably, it worked.

I said, “Ma’am, I understand why you are so upset and I don’t blame you. From where you are standing, this might look bad. But I assure you it’s not what it seems. I met Cherry on an online dating site. We emailed, chatted, and quickly became good friends; that’s all (the last part was a blatant lie, but I wasn’t going to dump water on a grease fire).

I asked Cherry to come over because of what happened at work yesterday. I’m a fireman and we were called to the scene of an accident—the worst I’ve ever seen. I helped pull a young girl out of the car. She was being flown by life flight to the hospital, but she died in transit; I was holding her hand at the time.

I took it really hard and needed a friend to talk to. That’s all. Cherry slept on the couch.” The last sentence was technically true: she slept there with her head on my lap before we went to bed...

She asked, “That’s how you got the staples in your head?”

I replied, “Yeah; and the stitches in my shoulder.”

Cherry’s mom nodded slightly in understanding, but she was still not happy with me.

After what seemed like a long talk but actually only lasted about half an hour, Cherry’s mom seemed convinced that I was in complete agreement with her (because I lied my ass off) and we were on good terms when she left my apartment. After I closed the door behind her, I exhaled a large sigh of relief before going over everything in my head again.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter to me that she didn’t want me hanging out with Cherry. She was my girlfriend and, as long as she wanted to be, she would remain my girlfriend. But we were going to have to take our relationship ‘underground’ for now.

Cherry’s mom had given me a lot to think about. I had every intention of continuing to see Cherry, of course, but things would be more complicated for sure. I found myself pacing around my apartment while trying to figure out how to handle a million different issues.

I never realized before then a habit that I had. When deep in thought, I evidently had a habit of running my hand over my head and down to the back of my neck as a way of self-massaging away tension. I became suddenly aware of the habit because every time my hand reached the back of my head, I found a bunch of staples with no small level of pain. The resulting effect was two-fold.

For one, it rudely ended my minor relief of tension. Second (and worst of all), it served as a reminder about Katie, thus adding to my stress. It was almost like a cruel joke: when you have something unpleasant in the back of your mind—well, I had a literal reminder on the back of my head causing me both physical and mental pain. I couldn’t wait to talk to Cherry.

Just before 2:30 my phone dinged with a text message from the prettiest girl in the world. Cherry said that she needed to tell me some things and wanted to know if I could talk. I texted back ‘of course’ and waited for her call. Fifteen minutes later, my phone rang, but rather than a phone call, Cherry was calling with FaceTime.

Once the video came into focus, I answered by asking how her day was. She said it was ‘fine’ but she struggled because there was so much she needed to tell me. She spent the next ten minutes telling me what I had already discovered from her mom; including that as long as she was in school and living under her mom’s roof, that she was not allowed to date.

Finishing her ‘confession’ she apologized for not being completely honest about everything from the beginning. Explaining that she wanted to tell me but was worried about how I might take some of the news, Cherry said that ultimately she knew she had to tell me because she didn’t want our relationship to be built on any lies.

I let her finish all that she had to say and told her about how my day went. She was mortified to learn that her mom knew that she spent the night with me and even more so that she came to my apartment to confront me.

Cherry asked, “What I’m I going to say to her? She’s going to kill me!”

I said, “My advice is to tell her exactly what happened: that you answered the call of a friend in need and spent the night on the couch—just like I told her you did.”

Cherry smiled and said amused, “You liar!”

‘Defending myself’ I said, “If I had been honest, I’d be an honest dead man!”

Cherry laughed and agreed with my assessment. I gave her some more advice on what to say and what not to say when she got home and was confronted by her mom. To try and reduce how long she was going to be grounded—our stories needed to match perfectly. Just as we were finishing getting our stories straight, a girls voice from out of my view called out to her and said, ‘come on; we have to go or we’ll be late!’

Cherry said with an exaggerated frown, “I have to go to practice!”

“I understand: you have to have your priorities,” I teased her, implying cheer leading was evidently more important than me.

“HEY! That’s not fair!!!” Cherry protested while pretending to have been insulted.

I smiled and said, “You go practice! When can I see you again?”

She thought for a second and asked, “What are you doing Friday?”

I shook my head ‘no’ to indicate ‘nothing’ and she continued, “We have a home game: come and watch it! I’ll be cheering for it, of course, but we’ll get a few minutes at least...”

I said, “I’ll be there! What time?”

“Be here at 6:00?”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

A voice off camera screamed, “CHERRY! NOW!” She nearly jumped out of her skin and said quickly, “Gotta go!” before she kissed the camera on the phone and disconnected the call.

The conversation only lasted about 20 minutes, but I felt like I just got home from vacation. I felt so good that I decided to go and see how the guys at the firehouse were doing. On the drive there, my shirt was irritating my stitches and it had me once again thinking about little Katie.

I parked on the side of the fire house and walked in to the shock of the other guys there. They were asking me how I was doing and I assured them I was ‘ok’ as we went on to talk about what was going on.

A few minutes passed and Chief came passing through; stopping dead in his tracks when he saw me. I suddenly felt like the teenager sneaking out of his window late at night only to find his dad waiting for him on the other side.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Chief asked.

I said, “I was feeling ok and wanted to see what was going on.”

He barely waited me to finish talking before he said sternly, “My ass—you feel ok.”

The rest of the guys melted into the background and slinked away to find other things to do rather than witness what they thought was about to be an ass chewing (their feelings matched mine at that moment).

Chief continued, “You’re not ready. Come back when you are ready and not before. I don’t need you putting your life and the lives of anyone else at risk because you’re not 100%. I’m sure your head is telling you that you are ready. But if your heart starts taking over at the wrong time and makes decisions for you, then it’s bad for everyone. Coming here for a social visit just makes it take longer. Understand?”

I knew he was right and nodded my head—slightly embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of that myself. I asked, “How will I know for sure when I’m ready?” Chief said matter-of-fact, “You’ll just know. You won’t wonder if you are ready: you will KNOW that you are ready.”

I put my hand out to shake hands and thank Chief for always giving me good advice. To my surprise, he took my hand and pulled me in for one of those ‘manly hug/slaps on the back’. Luckily for me it was the other shoulder with the stitches!

Before I turned to leave, Chief said, “We look forward to you coming back, but until then, get the fuck out of here.”

I smiled and said, “Roger that, Chief. Thanks.”

I left the station and, for lack of much else to do, I went for a drive. I considered going to watch Cherry practice, but figured her mom might be picking her up afterwards and it would not be good to have her catch me there after our talk earlier. Thoughts drifted back and forth between Cherry and Katie; the girl on the back of my mind at all times it seemed.

After driving for a while, I suddenly realized that I was at the intersection of the accident and I pulled over to the side of the road to look at the scene. The car and debris had been removed, of course. There were still small pieces of glass all over the road, evidenced by the sunlight glinting off of them. I noticed for the first time that the truck’s tires didn’t start to make skid marks until it was at least 25 yards past the point of impact and I just shook my head in disbelief—he must have been going at the truck’s top speed.