Don't Be Afraid To Love

Chapter 29

The next day I was still free so I called Maria to meet me for a coffee. I was hungry for more information and she was the person to ask.

Maria was a housewife. She stopped working after she and Jacob moved in together a couple of years back. His paycheck was big enough to support both of them, and she preferred to take care of him and of the house instead of having a job of her own.

So it was obvious that she had to do something with all the free time she had. And she used it to learn everything about everyone - her friends, her neighbors, and Jacob's co-workers. She was pretty much like an informant. Because she almost never kept all that information to herself. Information had to circulate.

"Hi, Didi! How are you?" Maria asked me when I met her at the coffee shop downtown.

"I'm fine, I'm off from work for a few days 'til my scars heal, so I thought it would be nice if we met to chat a little."

"What happened?" she asked me visibly, eager to find out probably new gossip material.

"Oh... I borrowed Robert's bicycle, stumbled, and fell into a bush of roses and then hit the ground," I said matter-of-factly.

"Ouch!"

"It's okay. I was lucky. It could've been worse. Hey, I ran into Carmen the other day, and she actually thought Robert did this to me," I confessed laughing.

"What? No, he wouldn't..."

I was relieved that I received another confirmation that Robert wasn't aggressive, as Carmen told me.

"I know, right?"

"Although..." she added, frowning, pondering on something.

"Although what?"

"I mean... it's probably nothing..."

"What?"

"I think I heard his wife a while back saying he pushed her, grabbed her abruptly a couple of times, but I don't think he hit her. If you ask me, she was always asking for it, though," Maria said, raising her eyebrows and taking a sip out of the coffee cup.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean... I know they say don't speak ill of the dead, but... Sharon could be quite annoying. She let Robert bring all the money and do all the work, even in the house - she acted like a queen. She only took care of the baby."

"I see..."

"I don't know if it's true, but I heard that while she was dating Robert, she dated another man at the same time and rumor has it that she got pregnant with that man and quickly married Robby for the financial stability. The other guy didn't exactly have a good situation, so she fooled Robby into marrying him."

"Seriously?"

"I mean, I don't know if that's true, though..."

"Mark..." I muttered to myself, realizing maybe the 'other man' Maria was talking about must've been Mark, the one from the messenger chat.

"What?"

"Carmen told me about a man called 'Mark,'" I lied, not wanting to tell her how I found out about him.

"Yes, there was a 'Mark' in her life a few years back when I met them all. Jacob got employed at Spectra almost 5 years ago, so that was when I met Robby and Sharon and Carmen, and all the others. We were a nice group of friends - we liked to go out together pretty often. Now that you mentioned it, I think Mark was the guy Sharon had broken up with before meeting her husband."

"Okay, this is just way too much for me," I said and drank out of my coffee, thinking I was trapped in the story of a Latino telenovela.

Maria chuckled.