Summer Faded Into The Fall

And Jordan was like a missing person – I barely saw him at all.

It didn’t bug me at first, not seeing Jordan all the time. I knew he had lots of stuff going on with his daughter, his brother moving back into town and his dad finally spending the time with him that he should have years ago.

In fact, all the last minute cancellations on our ‘dates’ didn’t even faze me because I knew he wasn’t out banging some other chick or running around on me. I trusted Jordan more than I ever trusted anyone else and I knew that was due to the fact that we were best friends before we started to date.

While Jordan was spending time with Jenna, or helping Mike get settled, or bonding with his dad over some old car or new woodworking project – I wasn’t sitting around staring at the walls waiting for him to call me out of the blue and want to hang out. No, I was actually out making new friends and helping out the community.

The end of August was a busy week for me at work, along with all the MOD changes I had to do, the district manager was visiting and all the management in the store was in a panic. The last time the DM came to visit, he wasn’t too impressed with a lot of little things and this time we were hoping he was in a better mood.

“You haven’t seen Linda, have you?” I asked Barb as she ran through my department checking to make sure everything was prefect for the DM’s visit.

“No, sorry Anna, I haven’t seen her yet.” Barb started to walk away and as she went she told me that she would check to see is Linda called in.

Linda was a hard worker and she was very friendly towards all the customers, no matter how bitchy they were to her. If I wasn’t feeling that great, she would do something to cheer me up. When Josh and I broke up, Linda gathered all the books and magazines from stationary that featured some activity that you could do on our own, or some club that you could join to make friends and have a good time. When I told her that Jordan and I were giving it a shot, she gave me the biggest hug and, through her tears, she told me that she was happy for me.

“It’s almost like this is happening to me,” she bawled. “I remember feeling the same way when my Randy asked me out for the first time.”

When Barb paged me a few minutes later to come to the front office immediately, I was very worried. I ran towards the front, if there it wasn’t something important Barb would’ve called my phone in Infants or paged me to call her. I knew this wasn’t a good sign.

“What’s going on?”

With a grim look on her face, Barb handed me her manger phone and told me Linda was on the phone. I wanted to ask what was going on but Barb walked out of the office and closed the door behind her.

I stood there in the quite office, staring at the phone in my hand as everyone went about her business outside the door. I took a deep breath and brought the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

All I heard were tears.

“Linda?” I grabbed a chair and sat down. “What’s wrong?”

A couple heart wrenching sobs came over the line before she tried to speak. It took her a while and as she spoke it felt like my whole world was falling apart along with hers as she told me how the father of her kids, the main bread winner, fell thirty feet to his death on a construction site. She asked what she should tell her kids, she asked how she was supposed to give them everything they needed. She told me that Randy was her heart and soul, she didn’t know if she could go on without him.

It was the hardest call I ever received. There wasn’t a damn thing I could’ve said to her to help her through this so I did all I could do – I cried along with her and promised her that everything will be ok. “If you need me to do anything, just let me know, I’ll do whatever I can.”

She asked me if I could come and sit with her. Then, in the next breath, she mentioned the DM visit and said it was ok.

I knew I couldn’t leave work, but for a moment, I really didn’t care what happened if I did. She needed someone, she was all alone at the house – her family only moved to the community a couple months before and they didn’t have any family around.

“I’ll call someone,” I told her but she told me she would be fine.

When we hung up, I immediately dialed Chad’s number; Mary and Susan were spending the day together. “I need a huge favor,” I told Susan as soon as I got the ‘how are you’ out of the way.

I don’t think Susan was too thrilled that I was asking for something until I told her what was going on. “Oh my God!” She gasped. “That poor woman, of course we’ll stop by and see how she’s doing.”

After thanking her, I told her I would call Linda and tell her – to see if she would mind someone coming over for her. She didn’t mind, in fact, she cried and thanked me. “I didn’t want to sit here alone,” she told me before asking for Susan’s number.

I sat in the office for a long time after I hung up from talking to Linda again. It was in that time that I came up with some ideas of how I could help her out. I walked out of the office and at the morning meeting, I shared with everyone (Linda had asked me to let everyone know) what was going on and my plans to help her out.

This was the start of what would become a drive for me, to help those who needed it as much as I could. And I managed to get my family and the people in the community that I knew involved with my project.

My charity work kept me pretty busy when I wasn’t doing my day job but I still managed to hang out with my friend and family, and go on dates with Jordan when he was free.

It was great. Life was good but I was tired all the time. Getting up early for work and not getting to bed until midnight or later most nights was taking its toll on my system. Something had to change. I knew it but I didn’t make any steps to change it.

The first Friday of November finally rolled around. It was one I was looking forward too for a long time, Jordan didn’t have Jenna that weekend and he made some mention about us going out of town for the weekend. It would be the first time we got to spend any real time together in months.

I was in the lunch room, packing up my stuff so I could go home when Nick come waltzing in for his shift. “Hey Trouble,” he greeted me like always. It was fun to have him working as an unloader at the store. I got to see him everyday I worked and for a moment or two, it was nice to be around him without his family.

He walked into the locker room as I was saying ‘hello’. “Don’t go anywhere,” he called out. “I wanted to thank you for tomorrow night; I’ve been looking forward to it all week.”

“What?” I wandered back into the locker room. “What about tomorrow night?”

“You know,” he pulled his locker door open and dropped his keys into it. “The guy’s night that we are having tomorrow night; Jordan said you were ok with giving him up for the night.”

It was probably a good thing Nick wasn’t looking at me; my look would’ve struck him down.

“Anna?” Nick turned slowly to look over his shoulder at me. “Jordan did talk to you about it, right?”

I forced a smile. “Sure,” I shrugged. “I must’ve forgotten.”