Jana Nolan
Earth Star Publications
Eckert, Colorado
FIRST EDITION
First Printing September 2019
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2019 Jana Nolan
ISBN 978-0-944851-56-6
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
1. A Bad Direction . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
2. Deceit and More . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3. What Happened to Me? . . . . . . . . . . 33
4. Living the Wrong Life . . . . . . . . . . 44
5. Was I Right or Wrong? . . . . . . . . . . 62
6. Commitment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
7. Should I Stay or Leave? . . . . . . . . . 95
8. Entertainment, and More . . . . . . . . .114
9. Mind of Its Own . . . . . . . . . . . . .141
10. Repairing Instead of Repeating . . . . .161
11. Anticipating, and Waiting . . . . . . .183
12. New Beginning, or Sad Ending? . . . . .198
INTRODUCTION
For those of you that aren’t familiar with my style of writing, or any of my books, I would like to say that this book was a different style than any other book that I have ever written. While writing, I had to become the character that I wrote about.
I grew up in a small town called Montrose, Colorado. Most of my books revolve around a small town atmosphere, but with this book I take you in a different direction.
With all of my books, I like to give you, the reader, a look at the unknown, and leave you wondering if any of it could actually happen in our time period of life.
I want you to sit back and enjoy the story that you are about to read that will give you a ride of your lifetime. When you have finished reading this book, keep in mind that this book is only fiction, or is it?
My intent as I wrote this book was focused around different choices that some of us have made in our lifetime. Most people have regrets for bad decisions, whereas others don’t. Keep in mind that sometimes we are allowed to redo our bad choices and make a change, but many times we aren’t able to, which can affect our life forever.
As with all of my books, I try to give my readers a lesson of what can maybe happen to them, or an idea of what someone else in their life has experienced.
The main character in this book finds himself becoming something that he isn’t. Through help from an unknown object or person, he is given the opportunity to hopefully change the direction in life that he chose for himself. With this comes many emotions within this book.
Now that I have shared with you a brief summary of what the story is all about, it is up to you, the reader, to decide if any of the tales that you are about to read are capable of happening at any given moment or if they are just something that an author, such as myself, made up to captivate her readers. Fact or fiction?
Whichever way that you interpret this book, remember that there are strange happenings every day that surround us or, out of bad choices, we find ourselves in the middle of. With all of this in mind, please enjoy this fictional book that will make you think.
Someone once told me that life is like a tree. Everyone begins as a simple seed, where ‘roots’ are our foundation or family. As a small child or sapling, a person grows straight up as our family makes their choices for us.
Once we reach early adulthood, we begin to branch out, making choices that will define the rest of our lives. Each choice that we make defines the kind of person that we want to be and shapes our soul into the kind of person that we become. It also creates or cuts off other choices that might have changed our destiny.
At times I thought that these words to me were nothing but crap, but now that I am older, I have asked myself what kind of a tree others would say that I have become with the life choices that I made for myself. I have wondered many times if I had taken my life in a different direction, what would it be like today?
Others believe that from the time we take our first breath, our life becomes our own, and what we do with it comes from the free will that God gave to each and every one of us. Some people have been able to stop in their tracks and go back to undo the damage that they have created, but for most people there is no turning back time nor changing the reality of our future as we chose it to be.
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My given name at birth is Robert Frederick Stone. Throughout the years I have been called Robert, Rob, Fred, Robbie, and also names that I would just as soon forget. In other words, I have made some really bad choices, and even wishing upon a star didn’t let me change any of it.
Today I went to stand at my ex-wife’s grave site, where she was buried a couple of years ago. I didn’t even know that she had passed away until last week, when I happened to return to the town that I grew up in. Jenny and I also lived there during the short time of our marriage.
A man who was our next-door neighbor recognized me after many years of not seeing nor hearing from me. Of course, he didn’t know that Jenny and I were divorced, so he kept rattling on about how good neighbors we were and how he loved the small block dinner parties that we all had gone to, the block volleyball games that we had all enjoyed, and also that he was sorry about Jenny and my loss.
When he said this, at first I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. It could have been anything. Over the years since the divorce, I seemed to have lost a lot more than I ever gained. Sometimes life has a way of doing this to a person, whether they are down on their luck or have more money than they know what to do with.
I stood there and listened to him for about 10 minutes out of respect. Here is the funny part, where I wanted to laugh, as having respect for anyone and their feelings was something that I either lost when I was young or never had as I grew older. At that moment, I interrupted the man and what he was babbling about and said, “What is it about Jenny that you are talking about? We got divorced many years ago and I haven’t spoken to her since.”
“I thought that you were still married. I am sorry if I offended you in anyway. Jenny died a couple of years ago. She wanted to be buried in her home town of Apple Grove, where she was born. Those were her wishes, I guess. Myself and many others assumed that you two were still together,” the man replied.
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I could have stood there and thanked him for his time and information about Jenny, but as I said at the beginning, I am not that kind of a person. Small talk was never my game and that was a huge problem that Jenny and I had when we were married. She always wanted to fill me in on how her day had gone or some other bits and pieces of a conversation that I cared nothing about. In fact, I felt railroaded when Jenny told me that she was expecting a child.
I never wanted children. During her pregnancy, I stayed away from her as much as I could, and when she was in labor, I made up a fake trip where I needed to go out of town on a business trip for my company, just so that I wouldn’t be there at the hospital with her. Of course, I knew that at that time I was hated by her family and probably my own family wasn’t very happy with me either.
In other words, I was considered a selfish, arrogant, judgmental jerk by many people, and if the truth be known, I still am. Could I ever change the history that I had written for myself? Probably not! As I get older, I realize that peace of mind is very important to me and that there might come a day when I should have tried to change and make better decisions and choices.
This is why today I am standing at Jenny’s grave site, wondering what happened to her. I can hear a car with a radio blaring, coming down the dirt road that leads up here, with the person behind the steering wheel driving way too fast and this is annoying to me. When the car comes to a complete stop, I wonder why the man sitting inside the car has driven like a mad man, swerving all over the road in a cemetery. Now that he is walking up here to where I am standing, I guess I will find out why he chose to do this.
The young man is wearing a frown on his face and a chip on his shoulder. He is upset with someone or something. It is going to be interesting to find out why he is so angry.
“Are you Robert Stone?” the young man asked.
“Yes, that is one of the names that I have been referred to. I can see that you are angry and maybe you would like
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to tell me why. On my way up here, I don’t think that I ran down anyone or caused anyone to drive off of the road, so I am confused at why your attitude toward me is this way. How do you know my name?” I asked him.
“When my mother and I left a place that we had been living at for many years, I handed out my phone number to all my friends, in case they ever wanted to call me. I was told by one of them that you had paid a visit to Kingston, where I grew up, and where you had lived for a while until you bailed out on me and my mother many years ago. I think you know who I am. I am David, Mr. Stone. The son that you deserted!” the young man replied.
“You might be right,” I replied in a cold and heartless manner.
“My friend that told me that you would probably come here is the son of the man that you spoke with in Kingston. The man told his son what kind of car you were driving and a brief description of how you looked. When I saw you driving this morning, I had just come out of a store. Even with what you did to me and my mother after all of these years, I still wanted to meet the man that left us years ago! I shouldn’t care, but I have never in my life met a man who is as coldhearted as you, and I wanted to see for myself what a class act jerk looked like!” David commented.“Now wait a minute, son!” I said.
“Don’t you EVER call me son!” David said with anger in his eyes and voice.
“I have my reasons for leaving you and your mother. I was stuck in a marriage with a woman that bored me. She got pregnant with you and I had told her that I didn’t want any kids, but she lied to me about taking precautions to not get pregnant, and then expected me to accept it and live out a life with a woman that I had no real interest in.
“I took it for as long as I could and then left to go live where nobody could ever find me that might want to collect child support for a child that I didn’t want nor really care for! If you were in my shoes, you would have done the same
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thing!!! I came here today to see your mother’s grave site, but that is the end of it. I have no regrets for what I did, in spite of many people telling me that I should have. From your temper I can see that you turned out just like me!!!” I reply.
“I watched Mother struggle for years as she needed help and was so disappointed and hurt by what you had done to her. She couldn’t trust another man and never remarried again! I can see by your fancy car that you have done well for yourself and are a bitter, self-centered person that only puts value on objects and not what you should put it on. That, Mr. Stone, is someone helping everyone with forgiveness and understanding, and something that you will NEVER know anything about! I have said what I came here to say to you. I wish nothing but the worst for you the rest of the days that you live!” David replied with his finger pointed at my face before he walked away toward his car to leave, in hopes of never seeing me again!
The dust from the road flew through the air as David squealed his tires and drove away. This was something that let me know that he was so mad that I would not see him again. I turned around to look at Jenny’s grave one last time before walking away. This time I saw a bright gold coin laying in the middle of the grass on her grave that made me question whether David had thrown it there when I wasn’t looking at him, or if it just appeared magically as it was not sitting there before, when I arrived to stand there to look at her final burial place.
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I didn’t blame David for feeling hurt. During the time when I was growing up, I was told that I was just like my grandfather. Because he had passed away before I got to know him, I had no way of comparing him to myself. All I knew was that I did things my way for many years.
The words I heard were, “Robert, it’s all about choices and changes. Start again.”
Now I was really creeped out. A part of me wanted to take the gold coin and throw it as far away from me as I could get it, but my mind told me to hang onto it. I looked one last time at Jenny’s headstone and grave.
I walked away. It was time to leave and go in a different direction than where I had just been. David was right about my fancy car and my money that I had stored in banks. I had done many things that I shouldn’t have in order to have the kind of money that I had, but my life was my own and going backward in life was something that I was sure wasn’t possible. Then again, I wasn’t sure that was what I really wanted to do.
It was time for me to leave the cemetery. In spite of what David had said to me, I still believe that I did what I needed to do. My choices were my own.
That night I decided to stay in a motel and leave for my next destination the next morning. For a while now, I had been driving from town to town, trying to figure out if I wanted to settle down in one place for a while.
For years I have explored many different towns and cities. Some of which I was fortunate and increased my bank
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account. I am referring to Newark and Vegas. There was a part of me that wondered what it would be like to go back in time to my younger years, when my thoughts were formed about so many things, and try to figure out why I ended up the way that I did.
Before I went to sleep, I kept seeing myself standing over Jenny’s grave and her words that she spoke to me from her grave were once again haunting me as if for some reason for the rest of my life she was going to be controlling my every move. I again heard her say, “It’s all about choices and changes. Start again, Robert!”
I continued to watch the coin as it stopped flashing and was dimmer. Eventually I went to sleep.
Around 2:00 a.m. I woke up with a stiff neck from falling asleep on the couch. Over the years of making a bunch of money, I only treated myself to the best things that money can buy. I had chosen to stay in an expensive motel. When I laid down on the couch, I had no intentions of falling asleep there, but from the weird day that I had experienced, it didn’t take me long to doze off.
The coin was still in my left hand. My thoughts were too wild to even think about. What I thought I had even heard in the cemetery from what sounded to me like Jenny’s voice, with the coin getting brighter and brighter as it flashed, was something out of a Stephen King novel, where the coin would take over the person’s mind. I wasn’t going to let it do this to me! For now, I would blame this on a street light shining through my window.
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