Manuscripts
Melinda
Description
Melinda Stone is a young woman with many reasons to lead a happy and productive life. She comes from a loving middle-class family, is beautiful and educated. Her parents have always admired her beauty and fulfilled her every wish. However, after the death of her beloved father, Melinda loses her footing.
Unable to hold a job, she relies on financial assistance from her widowed mother, who struggles to make ends meet. Melinda enters a troubled relationship with Benny, an unemployed man who considers himself a misunderstood artistic genius. Benny’s father, a well-regarded politician, must resign his prominent government position due to his son’s drug dealing and philandering.
Benny moves into the apartment Melinda inherited from her father, and she gives birth to their son, Bobby. Insecure and lacking motivation, Melinda denies reality and feels sorry for herself. Bobby is her only source of light in the darkness of her new life.
Will Melinda find a way out?
Excerpt
Melinda Stone kept a framed photograph of herself on her nightstand. In the photograph, a wide-brimmed hat fancifully cocked to the left threw a shadow over Melinda’s high cheekbones. She wasn’t smiling, as one typically would when posing. Her brown eyes seemed black. Her body was slender. She looked seventeen or eighteen, very beautiful.
In reality, she was twenty-three in the picture. Bella Conta, her friend of many years, had taken it the previous summer on Cove Island, by the Long Island Sound in Stamford, Connecticut. Melinda lived in Stamford. Bella, who used to live there when they were children, lived in Burbank, California, and came to Stamford for a one-day meeting related to her business. Melinda understood the business was a food franchise in Burbank Bella’s father had purchased for Bella to manage immediately after she graduated Suma cum Laude in Economics from Columbia University. Bella’s family—father, mother and younger brother—resided south of San Francisco, which was close enough to Burbank for Bella to visit and far enough to give her the impression of being independent.
One hour, at nine in the morning the day after her meeting, was all Bella could spare for Melinda. At ten, a limo was picking her up from the hotel and driving her to LaGuardia. During the hour, the two climbed in Melinda’s Camry for the short ride to Cove Island, where, in memory of their common past, they strolled on the asphalted pathway from the parkway to the shore.
While walking, Melinda felt the old magic was absent from their encounter. “You’re becoming quite a jet setter,” she noted, lacking anything better to say, her voice fraught with a tinge of envy.
Bella stopped and drew a half-circle with her white tennis shoe on the sand adjoining the pathway. “You could crisscross the sky as well, if you really wanted to.”
“I want to, but God decided otherwise.”
“God? Since when you believe in God?”
“I don’t. It’s just an expression,” Melinda said.
Bella started walking again, the water, not even thirty feet ahead, breaking the silence with the soft lapping of the surf. “You are smart, educated, beautiful,” she said. “You don’t have to work as a secretary. Look for another job.”
“Easy for you to say. My degree in business is nothing. And Daddy doesn’t have Andrew’s money.” Melinda knew Bella’s father well and called him Andrew. And often, when she spoke of her own father, to show how close she was to him and how much she loved him, she referred to him as Daddy, even though she was no longer a little girl. At that moment, she was perceiving Bella as patronizing, and in return, she wanted to goad her. That’s why she mentioned his money. Besides, beauty had little to do with somebody’s job, or nothing at all; or it shouldn’t have. As for being smart, if she were smart, Bella was a genius. Academically, Bella had excelled, while Melinda, who had gone to the University of Connecticut—which wasn’t Columbia—had been, at best, a mediocre student. After unsuccessfully searching for employment for months after college, it was Melinda’s father who found her a job with a manufacturer’s representative selling pumps: centrifugal pumps, Moyno, piston, what have you. The rep company consisted of only the two people: the owner, Michael Currier and herself, hired to replace the old secretary who was retiring. When the interview ended, Michael shook Melinda’s hand to enforce the offer, and she sensed a bent finger rubbing against her palm. The finger shouldn’t have been there. She told Daddy about it and called it indecent. Daddy laughed. He had met Michael through work and knew that he suffered from Dupuytrane contracture. That was when cords of tissue formed under the skin of older men’s palms and permanently pulled in one or several of their fingers.
This was it, in a nutshell. Maybe Melinda should have shared her story with Bella and laughed about it. And maybe together they could have found a way for her to get out of this life, of this rut, and out of her relationship with Viktor, her boyfriend. Not that she had mentioned Viktor to Bella, or that he was important.
But Bella reached the water edge, turned and extracted a small camera out of her purse. “Let me take a picture of you. Smile, Mindy.”
A seagull flew toward Melinda. It dipped and rose, and Melinda rearranged her hat, keeping her lips pressed together, pouting.