I'll never leave you alone,
I'll never leave just a memory.
I'll never leave you alone in the garden
Where nothing grows.
– Harry Nilsson
Amelia Thorn, 'Amy' to pretty much everyone except her daughter, looks across the Corian vanity top in the master bathroom, to the mirror fixed to the papered wall. The wall is patterned with small and large seashells, like an island beach arranged by an anal retentive decorator and then turned vertical, the pattern Sarah's choice when they first moved in. In the mirror, she idly gazes at her nude torso, considering the slight red glow of the skin above her breasts, and the slight itchiness she feels there, tiny red spots she thinks might just be signs of a moderate sun burn.
Her breasts are modest in size, B cups, and unaffected by the dermal turmoil above them. They look even creamier than normal, due to the contrast with her reddened, exposed skin, and her pink nipples and areolae match the reddish glow of her upper chest. She's happy that her breasts are still quite proud and firm, but doesn't believe that is the most important concern in her world.The love of her family outweighs any minor issues of passing beauty.
Sunburn is a new thing to her - she's now pretty much an indoor animal, her office job keeps her tied to a desk. She's trying to decide whether it might be better to let sunburned skin peel off on its own, or help it along. She thinks she might be in the help-it-along faction, as she's always been a tad impatient for most of her 34 years of life. She sees no reason to exclude overexposure to the sun from that general life view.
She hopes that will be the toughest decision she faces in these last few days of vacation remaining to her. She inhales deeply, heaving her modest breasts upward , then, exhaling rapidly in exasperation, and her cute breasts move downward. Her nipples are small, but will grow when she's sexually excited. She sighs, and brushes her neatly manicured fingers through her short black hair. She thinks it looks like a birds nest, but it's a certainty that Sarah likes the look. That's good enough for Amy. She loves Sarah more than life, and almost as much as she loves Katy.
The previous day, a Saturday, her small but cozy family - her wife Sarah, 30, and their small daughter Katy, just six years old, had gone on a beach outing to the Gulf of Mexico, at a tiny public beach in Port Lavaca, Texas. The beach day was typical for the area, with powdery, white sand, like refined sugar underfoot, gently lapping waves coming off the green water of the Gulf and speaking in small, murmuring voices as they lapped the shoreline, and a soft breeze blowing into shore at a steady pace, cooling the hot, sunny day, something like the experience of opening a refrigerator door after stirring a steamy pot of pasta, a brief respite from the heat, but appreciated nonetheless.
"I'd better start wearing sun screen," Amy thinks. "The sun seems stronger than when I was a little girl." The thought of being a little girl again, sends her memory back to her life as part of a different family. She can remember pirouetting on the beach in New Jersey nearly nude, her long, glossy black hair tied in a ponytail, and whipping about recklessly, one of her first memories as a four-year old, giggling madly as her mother, Elizabeth (Beth to her friends), chased her and hugged her, once Amy let herself be caught. In the distance she could see her father looking on, trying to hold back a smile, but failing miserably, finally chuckling with love for his impetuous young daughter. The memory gives Amy a warm glow inside, to match her exterior glow, as she remembers her mother and father, both dead now for five years, victims of urban violence.
Her mother and father, both long-tenured professors at nearby Towson University in Maryland, had been walking in downtown Baltimore on a cool, wet spring day, having just attended a Sunday seminar on "The Benefits of Long-Term Financial Planning." It was one of those scheduled meetings held at slightly seedy chain motels, that have tickets and 'limited seating', and seem as though they're exclusive to just you (and perhaps a friend), when in fact anybody at all can get in, even without a ticket, as long as they look as though they could afford the speaker's book. The book always coincidentally happens to be on sale in the back of the room, at a folding table watched over by the speaker's wife, who could probably tell us all something about 'Long Term Financial Planning', and why you don't really want to end up giving those kinds of seminars when you should already be retired somewhere in Arizona.
Her father Michael, his newly purchased copy of the speaker's book in hand, had tried, perhaps foolishly, to come to the aid of a seemingly unconscious man lying on a sidewalk by the Baltimore street. The man was a drunken vagrant, and he was in the midst of delirium tremens, better known as 'the DTs'. Mistakenly seeing Amy's father as a nightmare out of some 50's 'B' sci-fi movie, the vagrant had abruptly knifed her father as he tried to pick the man up, thinking he was defending himself.
The long, slightly rusted, blade of the man's knife severed her father's aorta expertly, though the assailant himself was only a drunken amateur at the art of breaking hearts. The police had come immediately, but as it turned out they were completely unable to help Michael Thorn, nor were they of much help a week later when her mother had died of a heart attack at the funeral of beloved husband and father Michael. The drunk's knife had mortally pierced two hearts, and done severe damage to Amy's - though, of course she had been nowhere near the scene.
Becoming an orphan is never easy, no matter at what age it happens, and if it hadn't been for Sarah and Katy, Amy wondered if she, too, might not have succumbed to grief, as her mother did. The aging her mother went through in one week was startling, and taught Amy that, under the right (or rather, wrong), circumstances, even otherwise healthy people could find their life span abruptly cut short.
Shaking her head slightly and blinking her blue eyes, as if to sift out the bad memories, while keeping the good, Amy returns to her musing on the present.
She's taken a full week off from work, a vacation she thinks she richly deserves, as she's just been proclaimed Delco and Adams Associates' "Certified Public Accountant of the Month" for the Victoria, Texas metropolitan regional office. As people have often suspected, and I'm sure you will agree, the accounting business is riddled with tension. Certified public accountants rarely maintain their nerve and sanity for more than 40 or 50 years in the pressure cooker of adding numbers in the most advantageous ways for their clients.
"Gosh," Amy had thought to herself, "There was that one accountant who had cracked under the unrelenting pressure of schmoozing clients, chatting up female comptrollers, and breakfasts with boards of directors, and massacred 3 tarpon on the deep sea fishing boat party the company had set up last year for the Gulf Coast office."
Amy imagines that many varieties of fish still tell their spawn of the horrors of that day, as an object lesson. Of course, fishing wasn't really Amy's thing - she preferred to spend her time with Sarah and Katy. On this particular day of her vacation, the day after their beach visit, she had shopped for wood flooring for their sunroom, and had gathered color chips for the wall paint to show Sarah, to see if they might agree on a decorating scheme.
She's musing over the humdrum nature of her life, and how she really couldn't imagine a better one, when Sarah walks over to Amy's comfy place on the love seat, holding a small glass of California chablis. Two thoughts occur to Amy in rapid succession: the first, that the wine is probably for her, since she drinks wine, and her lovely 30 year old partner favors Scotch. The second thought, hard on the heels of the first, is that Sarah probably wants something from her, and is commencing the 'butter-Amy-up' process.
"Here, babe, you looked like you could use a nice glass of wine," Sarah says, with a smile, her beautifully white teeth flashing. Amy has already noticed that Sarah had chosen to wear her sheer blue halter top, which shows off the shape of her breasts nicely, and her shoulder-long ash blonde hair rests on it fetchingly. Her lips are newly refreshed with a particularly vibrant shade of rose lipstick, and shine alluringly, causing Amy's pulse to quicken slightly. Sarah's calves are smooth and pleasingly-shaped, and as her legs are demurely crossed, her long skirt pulls up slightly, exposing her tanned skin.
