The Space In Between(3)

Daddy stood in the doorway, his soft eyes smiling towards me. “What you thinking about?”
I shrugged my shoulders. The answer was so obvious that I was surprised he asked. “Derrick.”
He walked to my window, pulling open the curtains. Dangit, Dad. As we looked out the window, we saw more people walking up to our house with those stupid gloomy faces they had grown accustomed to delivering my way. The problem with living in a small town was that it was a small town. One stoplight in the middle of ‘downtown’ by the bakery. A themed Christmas party every year. Fred’s Diner. A small town, filled with small-minded people. And the accident was the biggest story since Peter Ericks stole the school’s history books because he said they were filled with the devil’s teachings. That was in 1993.
Daddy opened the window and the breeze came, lightly kissing my cheeks. A wave of guilt washed over me. I felt a heavy weight on my soul for making it hard for my family to be happy. I could tell they knew I was still a mess, but they wanted to give me time to get better on my own.
My eyes shifted to the ground, unable to connect with Dad’s. “Don’t you miss your crafts, Dad?” He was a jack-of-all-trades. From building lawnmowers to homemade water pumps, Daddy did it all. He loved to get his hands into something new each week. But since the accident he had been catering to me nonstop. He would say, “Don’t worry about such things,” but I did anyway.
“My friend Ladasha moved out to New York City.” I paused, fearful of his reaction. “I was thinking after I get the cast off I might go join her.”
“Andrea…” He started to disagree with my idea, but I didn’t give him much of a chance.
“Everyone sees me, Daddy. They look at me and remind me that I am broken. They make me want to break down into tears just by glancing my way. They whisper—Dad…you gotta let me go. Ladasha already said she could get me a job and everything if I needed her to. I mean, I was going to move to New York anyway. Might as well now.”
He sighed and removed his glasses, rubbing between his eyes. He looked over to me and plopped down on my mattress. “Your mother’s going to have a heart attack.”
I smirked. The first smile I had in a long time. “Yeah well, that’s not way out of her norm, now is it?”


Chapter Two

“I’M PREGNANT,” SHE said. I looked to my wife, and she had a look of terror in her eyes. Iris was beautiful. Slim, olive skin, soft honey brown hair running down her shoulders, brown eyes that could make love with anyone. And she was telling me she was pregnant. I was almost certain I knew why her eyes looked so scared right that moment.
Iris covered her mouth with water filling her eye sockets. I’d never seen her like this before; she must have been terrified this pregnancy would end like the others. I guess she was already tapping into her hormones as she walked over to me and touched my hand. She felt like ice. “Cooper…say something.”
Say something? No. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. My mind was busy doing mathematics. I raised an eyebrow. “How far along are you?”
“Five weeks.”
Five weeks. My heart started pounding against my chest, wanting to leap out. I shoved her hands away from me; her touch alone made me a different man. No. This didn’t make sense. None of this made any f*cking sense. How the hell could she be five weeks pregnant if we hadn’t had sex in five months? Tears started pouring from her eyes as I witnessed my wife cry in front of me for the first time ever. I couldn’t even trust her tears to have meaning because they were falling from a web of lies. My fingers were becoming tight, and the only way I could control them was by forcing my hands into fists. “Who?”
“Cooper…” She cried.
“Dammit Iris, who the hell is he?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
She wiped her pathetic eyes and sobbed into her hands. Her body was shaking uncontrollably, almost to the point where I thought she would pass out. I glanced to her stomach. I wanted to throw up. She opened her mouth, and at first, nothing was heard. She swallowed a deep breath of air and released it through those damn lips that were once upon a time attached to mine.
“Speak up!” I ordered her, and when she did, I went quiet.
Tom Reed.
The name didn’t take long to settle into my head. I knew who he was. Iris and I had just wrapped up filming his wedding on our reality show, The Davidson’s Weddings, a few weeks prior. Five weeks ago to be exact. I had just finished editing wedding photos of him and the new Mrs. Reed. And during that time he had somehow managed to get my wife pregnant.
“Wh—what? Did y’all f*ck before or after he cut his wedding cake? Iris, was it before or after his first dance? Did the camera crew catch you? Good God.” I was pacing now, running my hands over my face, feeling the sweat drip from my forehead. Pacing back and forth in a home I was no longer a part of. My southern roots were slipping out of my dialect the angrier I became. My fingernails digging deeper into the palms of my hands. I couldn’t believe she would do this to me. To us!
“Cooper, I still love you,” she promised. She reached for me and I couldn’t help but let out a harsh laugh. The laughter was cut short. I felt drippings running down my clinched fist. Sweat? No. My knuckles were bleeding. Why were my knuckles bleeding? My eyes shifted to the shattered photo hanging on the wall in front of me. There was broken glass covering the carpet and I stepped back, confused. Did I do that? Shit…The DNA in the blood coating the photograph was sure to be a perfect match to my own.