While they weren't exactly the Montagues and Capulets, it was fair to say Melody Rogers and her fiancé, Randall Parsons were facing difficulties with their families over their impending nuptials. Both were 22, virile, inquisitive, passionate and deeply in love with each other. A fact that deeply troubled the mother of the future groom.
To be fair, no girl was ever going to be good enough for Grace Parson's only son, Randall. The fact that Melody came from the wrong side of the tracks only intensified her distaste for the manipulative, young hussy.
Randall and Melody had met a year and a half earlier when they were both hired as seasonal help at the local Home Depot, and started dating soon after. When Grace found out her son had proposed a few months earlier, her natural inclination was to assume Randall had knocked her up. Randall denied it, even offering to bring his mother a vial of Melody's piss for Grace to test to verify his point.
Grace held out hope the two would find something else shiny to focus their youthful hormones on, but as time went by, the young lovebirds didn't show any signs of tiring of each other. Grace eventually accepted the direction of things when Randall made it known they'd talked to the preacher, rented out a hall for the reception, even put a deposit down on an apartment to move into.
Grace made one last ditch effort to get her estranged Husband, Cliff, to talk some sense into their son, but he just told her not to let her bitterness towards the institution of marriage keep Randall from finding happiness.
Normally, is the responsibility of the bride's family to handle many of the wedding plans. Therein lied one of the chief misgivings Grace Parsons had about her son's choice of a spouse. To say Melody Rogers came from a broken home would have been a understatement. Her father had been gunned down when she was two, a victim of a very agitated home owner who woke up to find her strung out father burglarizing his place.
One of the reasons the man was robbing homes was to support his and Melody's mom's drug habit, and it wasn't long after his death that she was arrested as well, beginning quite a long and sad list of brushes with the law.
Little Melody was shuffled from relative to relative for most of her formative years. Unfortunately, the seed from such dysfunctional soil even landed her with two separate stints in juvenile detention as a teenager. Having grown up near Grand Rapids, once Melody endured that second 18 month incarceration, she moved to Saginaw to live with her grandparents where she finished high school and started to re-build her life. That's when she met Randall.
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"Why would you want a girl who's Momma is a junkie and who's Daddy died trying to score her fix. Why would you want a girl who's been in and out of jail herself?" Grace asked her son once after finding out snippets of Melody's background.
It took all Randall had not to slap his mother.
"People aren't destined to be slaves to their upbringing," he tried to rationalize with her, only as a love-struck young man could about the object of his affection.
"It wasn't like we were the Cleavers growing up," Randall added that last jab which caused his mother to swallow hard before she fended off the urge to reach out and smack him in return.
While Melody certainly wasn't the monster her future mother-in-law was so desperate to paint her to be, she wasn't exactly the bastion of reformed purity Randall saw her as either. The truth, like so many things, was somewhere in between.
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Perhaps Melody Rogers was looking for the stability and calm Randall provided to protect her from the whirlwind quagmire her life had been to that point. She loved Randall, and he was the first guy she'd ever known that genuinely loved her back. That's not to say the slings and arrows, some silent and others not, that Grace Parsons had hurled her way since the announcement of the engagement hadn't hurt.
There were times she wished she'd never shared some of the elements of her background with Randall, but secrets are quicksand for the foundation of a relationship. Besides, given the amount of 'moral re-enforcement' she'd been given during her two stints in juvie and one in rehab, Melody had learned the hard way to be proud of who she was. She was a survivor.
That's why when Melody looked you in the eye, you should believe anything she would say. On the other hand, there was something burning so deeply inside her, something that she was still quite scared of, unless you looked really hard, you'd never see the inferno of that malevolent glow.
Even though Grace had made peace with the idea of Melody being her daughter-in-law, the truce between the two was tenable at best. At some point, Randall made the suggestion that the two women take off one afternoon on a shopping trip together, thinking if the two couldn't bond over some retail therapy, there wouldn't be any hope for them to ever get along. Begrudgingly, both mother and fiancé accepted.
There was a mall about 45 minutes from home that Grace always enjoyed visiting, and the pair took off late one Saturday afternoon after Melody got off from work to look for a few things for the wedding.
Traveling up an interstate, locked in a car with someone you can't stand is never an easy proposition. There wasn't a radio station the two could readily agree on, there really wasn't a comfort level between the two to talk about the 'big issues' facing them, and any attempt at small talk was pained and awkward. Other than an occasional comment about a passing car or something odd dotting the landscape, silence pretty much ruled the trip up.
With Grace's inability to see well after dark, they'd taken Melody's car. Between the young girl's erratic driving, and the lack of leg room, Grace's feet were asleep and her knuckles were white by the time they reached the mall.
They spent the better part of two hours walking the mall, and even though they bought a couple of things, it was clear their tastes in fashion and style were as diametrically opposed as most everything else. Grace made a point to show Melody several kitchen utensils and equipment, making a not so subtle dig at the girl's indifference at learning how to cook. At some point a little later, Melody pointed out some rather revealing lingerie then bought it, loving the sickened look on Grace's face knowing she might be wearing it on the wedding night with the woman's beloved son.
The two women wound up buying enough stuff to fill the trunk of Melody's car before they pulled out of the parking lot and started heading back to Saginaw, a little after 6pm, that early December evening.
The lack of legroom and Melody's questionable musical preferences weren't the only things that made a trip that long unbearable. Grace's thimble sized bladder didn't help much either. They'd stopped at a rest area about halfway up, and even without asking, Melody pulled into the same one on the drive back.
Giving the younger girl a gruff but appreciative 'thanks' for pulling over without having to ask, Grace got out to stretch her legs, grab a smoke and pee. By then darkness had settled fully over central Michigan, but even if it had been the brightest day of summer at high noon, Grace likely would have never noticed the beat-up van that was idling six spaces away. The same van that had been following their every move since they left the mall in Bay City.
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Grace spent a good ten minutes in the restroom then smoked another cigarette before getting back inside the car with Melody to make the final trudge home. Knowing it would be both petty and redundant for them both to call Randall to tell him they were on their way back, Grace dismissively deferred, allowing Melody to have the honors before they pulled out of the rest stop and entered a notorious digital dead zone over the next 20 miles or so.
Five minutes after they headed back on the road however, Melody's car began to lurch and overheat. Disgustedly ringing her hands together and biting her tongue, Grace Parson's used every ounce of decorum she had not to curse out loud as Melody steered her wheezing vehicle into the breakdown lane.
"I've been coming up here for as long as I can remember and I've never had any issues with a car," the vitriol finally seeped from Grace's lips before she could stop herself.
