*Author's Note: This one's been in my Stories Folder even longer than the one I just published. It's a rare Older Man/Younger Woman story.
My own personal experiences with older women when I was a senior in high school make writing these much less interesting for me, because I can personally relate. Now and then I find a topic for the OM/YW scenario that flows easily. This is one of them.
As a side note, anytime I write about a particular city in any detail, I get emails asking me how long I've lived there. I grew up in western Washington state and now live in Virginia. I just do a little research online to learn the names of streets and restaurants or parks to provide a modicum of authenticity.
As always, I hope you find it enjoyable.
*****
Northeast Florida
She heard her father sigh then heard the music in the background and got concerned.
"Dad? Are you drinking?"
It took him a few seconds to answer because he was, but he fessed up and told the truth.
"I am."
She thought about scolding him, but she knew he didn't do this often. She also knew that after the way her mom died he had every right to have a few drinks. But that didn't mean she didn't care about her father even though she no longer lived with him. At least not full time.
"I hear the Rolling Stones," she said instead, trying to remain nonjudgemental.
"Oh. Yeah. I uh, I've been a little melancholy today."
She was all too familiar with the empty, dazed look in his eyes; the same look he had when a detective showed up and told him that his wife had been killed during a bank robbery. You know, the kind of thing that only happened on TV cop shows. She'd been 15 when it happened and home with her dad waiting for her mom so they could have dinner together.
Her mom had worked at the bank for 17 years, starting right out of high school, and the worst thing that had ever happened up until then was a man having a heart attack one day just after the bank opened for business. It was her mom that rushed to help him as someone else called 911. The man spent a night in the hospital and was released, and as far as she knew he was still alive and well.
Bank robberies did happen. They just didn't happen in mid-sized towns in northeastern Florida. And on those very rare occasions when they did no one was taken hostage. And no one ever...died. At least that what Kara Nelson had always believed until she learned that sometimes terrible things happen to good people; people like her mother, Sara Fisher-Nelson, who was the kindest, sweetest, prettiest woman she'd ever known.
The first year was the hardest for both her and her father, Richard Nelson who went by Rick. Born in the late 70s, he was well aware of Ricky Nelson, the singer and actor from the TV show "Ozzie and Harriett" from the 1950s. The handsome young heartthrob was killed in a plane crash, and many teenage girls around the country were heartbroken. But as time went on and his 'kinda' namesake was largely forgotten, the references to him as Ricky Nelson died, too.
The second year was better but still difficult for both of them, but by the time Kara turned 18 and graduated from high school, she'd largely recovered from the loss, but her father was still struggling. Her mother was the only woman he'd ever loved, and that love went all the way back to junior high school when he asked Sara Fisher, the prettiest girl in school, to a the first dance his parents allowed him to take a date to.
It was more than a storybook romance. The two of them had become inseparable, and in spite of many, many people telling either and both of them it would never last, they married when they were just 19 and were as much in love they day she died as they'd ever been.
So when Kara's dad occasionally had one too many she understood why.
"I miss her, too, Dad," she said with sincerity and respect for his feelings.
"Yeah. It uh, it...never goes away, does it?" he replied, unaware that his daughter, who still dearly missed her mother, had moved on. She hadn't forgotten the woman who gave her life and her moral values. She'd just decided not to live in sadness and sorrow another day.
Kara heard the lyrics of the Stones' song and recalled how many times her father had listened to the same old sad tune. For a moment back home in her room as the music made its way in even with the door shut. She wondered if he was also playing "Angie", Jagger's other well known sad song.
"Wild, wild horses. Couldn't drag me away," Mick Jagger sang.
Her mother loved horses--wild horses in particular--and had always dreamed of moving to Montana with enough land where wild horses could still thunder across the open ground and run for miles. She never wanted to catch them and break them. She just found them to be magnificent and beautiful creatures and wanted to live close enough to them to be able to see them in their natural environment.
But her husband was the more practical of two and kept putting off her dream in favor of 'staying put' for a few more years and saving up enough money to get Kara through college and then maybe they'd see.
Now he spent a lot of his time beating himself up for not taking a risk; a risk that meant she'd have never been in the bank that day. She'd still be alive and well, and while it would have almost certainly also meant that Kara would have had to work part time to pay for school, her mother would still be there for her, just a phone call away.
Ironically, when her mother died, all of their financial worries ended along with her life. She'd insisted on term life policies for both her and her husband early on, and they paid double in the event of accidental death, and dying at the hands of a thief high on meth amphetamine and desperate for more, was more than enough to qualify for the larger payout.
Kara was enjoying a 100% free-ride through college with spending money and a new car--things she dearly appreciated and never took for granted. She thought of her mom every time she got in the car or started a new semester without getting a bill. Like her father, she'd trade it all to have her mom back. But unlike her father, she'd given up on that idea well over a year ago. She was doing well in school and had recently met someone whom she liked and who treated her very well.
Rather than respond to his comment about how it 'never goes away', she changed the subject.
"You mentioned that Karen Lessard asked you to a Jaguars game. Did you go?"
Again, her father didn't say anything for several seconds.
"Um...no. It's...it's too early for that, honey."
Kara knew that some people were 'ready' a year later while others needed five, ten, or even more years before they could even think of being with someone else.
"But I...I've been thinking about Montana lately."
Before Kara could ask him a question about it, he said, "A lot."
She chose her words carefully as she replied.
"Dad? Do you even like horses? Or...the wilderness?"
"Your mother did," he told her, his voice hollow and filled with sadness. The sadness was always there, and the drinking always made it worse.
"Dad, you need to find your dream, don't you think?" she offered as kindly as she could.
"I used to love riding horses with your mom when we were...your age," he said, his voice now choked with emotion.
Kara's maternal grandfather had horses, and her future parents often spent hours out riding the trails where her mother grew up. She smiled when she thought about the romantic aspects of those trail rides then thought, "Eeew!" after really thinking about what happened during them.
"Maybe you should, you know, find a place to ride and see if you still enjoy it," Kara told her father.
