Read Online 9781618850638IfOnlyYouKnewBergman by Unknown - Free Book Online Page A

next day, my
grandma was up drinking her morning coffee and eating her toast. “Hey grandma,
I see you’re up early.” I smiled, pouring me a cup.
    “Yeah baby, I am, you know I’m always up at six,” she said to
me as I gave her a kiss on top of her silver hair and sat down next to her at
the table.
    “Sweetheart, I want to tell you a
story about when I fell in love with a boy who lived in the town I grew up in.
Oh, he was such a sweetheart to me, Jason Milton was his name, and he was so
handsome too. Sometimes, he’d leave me candy on my windowsill, or he’d swing me
on the swings. We had loads of fun being around each other like we were. But I
never did tell him how I really felt about him until it was too late. He moved
up North to live with some relatives of his when we were teenagers. Oh baby, my
heart broke that day, and I never was able to get over it afterward,” she
solemnly said as she sipped her coffee.
    “You never tried to get in touch with
him or anything like that, Grandma? I mean, there are ways to find people, you
know.” I assured her as she smiled at me.
    “Back then, we didn’t have the means
we do now. His entire family up and left right after he did. Come to find out,
the Klan was after them for something that I still don’t know to this day. I did
try to get in touch with him but come to find out he passed on about 10 years
ago. That hit me most of all, because I could have told him how I felt but I
never did.”
    I could tell that it hit her hard. I
saw the tears welling in her eyes, so I held her hand and she put hers over
mine for reassurance.
    “Plus your momma told me about what
you said to Richard,” she said as I rolled my eyes and put my head down on the
kitchen table.
    “I hoped she hadn’t told you.”
    “Well she did out of concern for you,
baby, I just don’t understand why you are here. You need to be there, getting
things resolved.”
    We sat in silence for the longest
time, drinking, and then my mom came into the kitchen and got herself a cup.
“Richard called three more times last night while you were sleeping.”
    I looked at my Grandma who was
looking at me with a smile, and I smiled back. “Why don’t you call him back,
baby? It seems like he’s worried about you.”
    “I told him that you would be on your
way back home this evening,” Mom said as my dad came in the living room with my
suitcase in tow.
    “You really planned all this out,
didn’t you momma?” I said shaking my head.
    “Go on upstairs and put on the outfit
I laid out for you to wear, and your dad is going to take you back to the
airport. I can’t stand being in the way of true love.”
    When I did get back to New York, and
finally made it back home, my voicemail was full of messages from Richard. I
sat and listened to every last one of them, “Marley, please answer the phone. I
am so sorry about what Laura said to you at the party. Please answer the
phone!” That’s how most of the messages went, asking me to answer the phone, to
call him back right away, that he was sorry for what Laura said and did to me.
    “I see you made it back home, what
happened?” Marie asked once I did settle in at home.
    “My mom found out and sent me right
back here to get things squared away with Richard. How is he, by the way?”
    “We went out last night, and he asked
me if I heard anything from you at all. I told him that you went away for a
while. That’s when he picked up his phone, and he called your parents. But when
they said that you weren’t around, he said goodbye and the look on his face,
Marley. I don’t think I have ever seen Richard look so down before, like he
lost his best friend,” she told me as I breathed a heavy sigh of sadness.
    “You need to call him and let him
know you are back.”
    “I’ll talk with you later.” Pressing
the button, I hesitated for a while before deciding to press the speed dial to
his number at the gallery, but eventually I did.
    “This is Richard