Weeping Willow

Chapter 10 - Willow

"Sometimes what you're looking for comes when you're not looking at all." ― Unknown

What. just. happened. I had to pinch myself several times after my first unofficial date with Russ to make sure I did not just imagine one of the most magical nights of my life. It was my first date ever. My first kiss. My first boy. I knew I would hit these milestones sometime but I was a true late bloomer. I expected I might hit some of them when I went to college at the University of Michigan. I never would have guessed that I would hit them while I was still at Sandusky High School.

I had lived in Sandusky for all of my life and no boy had spent a great deal of time getting to know me, much less liked me in that way. Now, I was seeing the most popular boy of Sandusky High School after spending much of my school years being a social pariah. I was known as the girl who ate lunch alone and rarely talked to anyone. Not the girl who made out with Russ Rivers.

It was such an abrupt reversal of fortune that I almost wanted to know if someone would jump out of the shadows and tell me that this was all a big joke. Was this some kind of elaborate dare that Russ was trying to see through because his football friends had goaded him into it? Was this a joke among the popular kids where I ended up as a punchline that people would remember for years to come? The thought of it terrified me.

The heart of the matter was that I would not just be hurt if that were true. I would be utterly crushed. Russ was one of the first truly good things to happen to me in a very long time. The best part of it was that he had come into my life so unexpectedly but it seemed like it was almost meant to be. I could not fathom the cruelty of our time together turning out to be a façade.

"Pull it together, Willow," I reminded myself.

Yes, I was developing feelings very quickly for Russ Rivers but I also had invited him into my life for a very specific reason. That reason was ultimately more important than anything. I needed to know what really happened to my father on the night that he died. Was it truly an accident or was there something more sinister going on? The note certainly seemed to imply that.

I closed my eyes and scrunched up my nose. The note was the only real clue that I had right now. The next time that Russ and I met, I would ask him if we would be able to extract any fingerprints from the paper. If we could get even one fingerprint, we could run it through the police database and see if it matched anyone with a criminal record or if there was a familial tie to someone in the database. That was one concrete avenue that we could fully investigate and rule out. If there turned out to be no match to the fingerprint, we would end up back at square one. I worried that I had messed up the fingerprints by handling the note too often though. Still, there was a hope deep inside of me that the fingerprint route would work. It would either bring about a match that we could track down or another lead that we could explore. I had to believe that or else we would run into a dead end for now.

I smiled at the realization that there was now a "We" in my head when I thought about Russ and this situation. It was hard enough looking into Papa's death and trying to find answers. Having Russ by my side during this process made it all just a bit more bearable.

Now, as the light dimmed outside, I pulled close the blinds and began dusting them. When I was finished with the duster, I grabbed an old dish rag and began wiping down the kitchen table. I worked like this for about a half an hour doing little tasks here and there inside the living room and kitchen. Unlike some people, I enjoyed cleaning. It gave me the chance to silence my overthinking mind and lulled me into a state of tranquility. 

My final task of the day was putting away the freshly dried dishes from the dishwasher. Mama was working a late shift tonight so I wanted to give her a clean house to come home to. There was always a certain sense of calm that came over me whenever I did house cleaning each week. The cleaning work was so mundane and routine that it almost swept me into a soothing trance as I thought of nothing else but finishing the chores.