Later that day, Madison plunked down on the sofa and pressed her face into a throw pillow to blot out the world and swab up a few tears. It had been a long day, and she still had no plan. The placid rustle of the leaves outside stood in stark contrast to the turmoil in her chest. The drop in temperature over the last few days was noticeable, but Daniel hadn't come into the house to light any fires, so Madison tried to compensate for the autumn chill with sweaters and sweatshirts. Unfortunately, as Madison pouted on the sofa swathed in an oversized sweatshirt pulled over her knees for warmth, the cooler temperatures only made her feel more lonely. Madison's favored method to obtain warmth had always been to spoon with Daniel, but, at the moment, she was pretty sure Daniel would have none of it.
"This has got to be the worst day of my life."
Not a single thing had gone right today. Daniel had disappeared with the early morning mist before she got a chance to talk to him, and that raised the total to nearly a week of stony silence from Daniel. Her visit to the lawyer had confirmed her worst fears when it came to the divorce suit, and when she followed Mrs. Selene's advice and called up Daniel's mother, Madison had been brutally rebuffed by a most sanguine Italian Mother's rage.
When she heard Madison's voice, Rosalina positively pounced on the opportunity to lace into Madison in both English and Italian. Madison never got another word in after she said "hello". Rosalina had been acidly vitriolic and ranted for a solid ten minutes before she spiked the phone to the floor, cursed loudly in Italian while she stalked around her kitchen, and, after she had cursed an astonishingly vivid blue streak into her grounded phone, summarily tasked Daniel's father to "Riattacca la cagna!" Google Translate later confirmed Madison's suspicions that this sentence was not complimentary.
Madison lowered the pillow as the early evening focused on the divorce papers on the coffee table and that sent a spider-leg chill up Madison's spine. She pulled her sweatshirt lower to guard against the thin, bleak draft, but it didn't help much. The dark maw of the empty living room hearth mocked her and the leather sofa she had so stridently insisted on was cold as a bare rock outcropping. Madison shivered.
The grandfather clock in the foyer, the one that she had literally pitched a fit to get Daniel to purchase for her, now ticked implacably towards Madison's doom. Just another rueful reminder of how she had self-indulgently edited Daniel's life to suit her, along with the dining room set, the china patterns, the curtains in the kitchen, the color of the siding on the house, the plants in the flowerbeds and a thousand other tiny decisions that piled up to mutate Daniel's life into her life plus Daniel. The most damnable thing was she had made all those decisions without one pause to consider Daniel might have thoughts on any of it. Now on this cold evening she sat alone as one of those decisions continued to accuse her with every "tik-tok".
Madison sunk down into the sofa to search for a respite from the cheerless rhythm of the clock. Honestly, she had never noticed how loud the damned thing was until now and, confronted by its rhythmic echo through her immaculately decorated, but quietly empty house, Madison seriously considered that she might retrieve the axe from the woodpile and put an end to it's ceaseless "tik-tok, tik-tok, tik-tok" pronouncement that she was dreadfully short on time. She had mere days to atone for two years of negligent ignorance and one day of foolish indulgence and the pressure to catch up was enormous. Failure now meant the end of her marriage to Daniel, and that thought, mingled with the cool evening air, sent more spider chills up her back. Madison sighed, uncertain of her next move.
She couldn't just give in and let her marriage go. Daniel was too important to her, and she knew now that she wanted to be the one that loved him and made him feel as loved and safe and warm as he did for her. More to the point she owed that to Daniel because he had loved her so well that he overlooked her selfish immaturity until she carelessly pushed it so far not even patient and quiet Daniel could ignore it. She had resolved to fight for his love, but she needed help. She needed a starting point, but where was she to find that if the people that knew Daniel the best either wouldn't talk to her or outright rooted against her? How could a girl overcome the fact that a guy's mother, whom he loved dearly, hated her? It seemed an insurmountable conundrum.
YOU ARE READING
A Beauteous Flower
عاطفيةMadison is a professional dancer and a professional dater with an eye towards a professional husband until a Romeo reminds her that she is a romantic at heart.
