Married In A Heartbeat novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Lawn

She finds her boxes on her mother's lawn, retakes the house in front of the neighbors, and watches her new husband put her ex on the grass. Colt tells her to check her bank account.

Sandpiper Lane was a street of low stucco houses with gravel yards and wind chimes.

My mother's house sat at the end with its blue shutters and the lemon tree out front.

I had lived in its back bedroom since I was seventeen, paying the utilities, while Roy lived in Darla's townhouse across town.

Tobin parked the truck across the end of the driveway.

My boxes were on the lawn.

Not one box, a whole row of them, taped shut, with my name on the sides in Darla's handwriting.

My mother's good mixing bowls sat in a laundry basket with a dishtowel over them.

Someone had put my winter coats on the lemon tree.

"Oh, no," I said, very quietly. "No, no."

"Stay in the truck," Tobin said.

"It's my house."

"I know." He was already looking at the front door. "I mean stay in the truck for ten seconds."

I did not stay in the truck.

I got out and walked up the driveway with my skirt in both fists.

The front door was shut, and the lock was new, bright brass.

I rang the bell, and I heard a car pull up behind me.

Roy's sedan.

My father got out of it slowly, and Darla got out of the passenger side already talking.

"Leanne, honey, you embarrassed us in front of everyone," she said. "We can fix it. Just come inside and talk."

"You changed my lock," I said.

"It's Roy's house."

"It's mine." I held up the paper from the bureau. "As of 5:12, it's mine. Mom wrote it that way. She wrote that the day I got married, it was mine."

Darla's smile stopped.

I had never seen it stop before.

"She would never," Darla said.

"Ask Roy."

My father looked at the lawn, and the boxes, and the lemon tree with my coats on it.

He did not say anything, and I watched him not say anything.

Something went cold in my chest and stayed there.

"Tobin," I said, without turning. "Do you have a drill?"

"I have three," he said.

He was already walking back to the truck.

He came back with a yellow cordless drill and a long screwdriver bit.

The neighbors had started to come out onto their porches.

A man in a bathrobe was holding a hose.

Tobin knelt at my front door and went to work on the new brass lock.

Darla found her voice. "This is breaking and entering."

"It's her house," Tobin said, not looking up. "I'm checking her deadbolt."

The screws came out in a long spiral.

The lock dropped into his palm, and he handed it to me.

I tossed it into the lemon tree.

Then I opened my mother's front door.

The smell hit me, old coffee and lavender and the dust that never leaves a kitchen.

My eyes stung so hard I had to stand still on the threshold.

A car engine roared behind me.

Colt's black truck skidded up onto the curb, and he jumped out in his rented tuxedo.

"There she is!" he yelled. "You stole from me!"

Every neighbor on Sandpiper Lane heard it.

I held onto the doorframe and said, "I didn't steal anything. You did."

He came up the walk fast, his face red, and he grabbed my arm above the elbow.

His grip hurt.

Tobin stood up.

He was not hurried at all.

He put one hand over Colt's wrist and squeezed once, and Colt's fingers came off my arm.

"Let go of my wife," Tobin said.

"Your what?" Colt said.

"Wife," Tobin said again, very pleasantly.

Colt swung at him.

It was a clumsy punch, an office-job punch, and Tobin leaned half an inch and let it go by.

Then Tobin put his shoulder into Colt's chest and walked him backward off the porch.

Colt landed on the lawn in my winter coats.

The man in the bathrobe said, "Ha!" and turned his hose on, accidentally, onto the grass beside Colt's head.

Colt sat up, soaked in his rented satin lapels.

Darla shrieked. Roy stood with his hands open, saying "Everyone, everyone."

I stepped over the threshold and stood in my mother's hallway in my wedding dress.

"Every key you have to this house goes in my hand tonight," I said. "Every copy."

"Leanne," Roy said. "Baby."

"You said fine, Dad," I said. "I heard you."

His mouth worked, and no sound came out.

Colt climbed to his feet, dripping, and pushed his hair back with both hands.

His smile came back, the small tight one, and I knew it for what it was now.

He looked straight at me.

"Check your bank account, Leanne," he said.

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