Better Not Love Me by Dan Kolbet Read Free Book Online Page A

vulgar than she liked, but she associated the song with the early 1990s when it was first released and she was still in high school. Things were easier then. Ice Cube raps about the terrible violence in South Central Los Angeles and just surviving it was the low threshold for being a good day. In many ways Amelia agreed with that; of course, she was never threatened by gang members or street thugs like Ice Cube.
    It was a good day for Amelia when she survived the demands on her time and got to spend hours with the kids, something she'd still not been able to do consistently this summer. She needed to figure out how to do that, one way or another, so this summer didn't end up being a complete waste for all of them. She only had so much time with the kids. 
    She looked down at the mileage tracker on her phone and saw that she'd already gone nearly three miles in the same basic direction and decided it was time to turn around and head back. She didn't like running on the highway anyway. The shoulder was narrow and the cars were too close. She found herself slowing down and jogging on the dirt and grass trail off the paved road. On her return trip the soft ground felt better on her knees, but the uneven trail darted back and forth, causing Amelia to slowdown and watch her footing much more carefully.
    Just before she turned off the highway and back down to the cabin road, the trail snaked up to the shoulder and stopped at a wooden cross, staked into the ground several feet from the asphalt highway. Amelia stopped running and pulled her headphones out of her ears, cutting off the hypnotic sounds of House of Pain's Jump Around . For some reason this cross seemed out of place. Sure, she had seen similar ones dotting highways and intersections before and thought nothing of them, but this one seemed different.
    The faded cross was splintered and worn. Gray lag bolts held it together; obviously a repair after the fact. A small hook protruded from the stem of the cross, from which a green spruce wreath and red ribbon hung, secured by a yellowing twist tie that had been knotted together many times.
    Amelia squatted down to inspect the wreath further. Stenciled into the ribbon were the words, “Damon Stewart, Beloved Brother and Son.” She’d never stopped to look at one of these memorials before; in fact, she’d ignored this one altogether on her first run past it. She glanced around, wondering what took place here that caused his person to be memorialized. Drunk driver? Heart attack? How old was he? The sign didn’t say father or husband, so she assumed he was a boy, maybe a teenager. Any number of things could have happened here. It was at an intersection, so maybe it had something to do with the secondary road toward the lake.
    She’d probably never know what happened to Damon Stewart, but that wasn’t what was tugging at her heart. While the cross was faded and had obviously been in the ground for years, the wreath was new. Brand new. The hot summer sun hadn’t faded it one bit. So someone somewhere took the time to come to this spot and place a new wreath in memory of their brother or son.
    It struck Amelia for the first time, that Edwin had never gotten a memorial like this at Rocktop Lake. How was he being remembered? And she was the person who should have done it. It was her son who Edwin saved that day. And he was the man she had been falling in love with, despite their brief and complicated romance. Didn’t she owe him something?
    Amelia had never even been up the trail to Rocktop Lake to see where he died. From Amy's house in Bonners Ferry it was just a quick hike in the summer. After what happened there she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had also forbid Marcus from ever going up there again—she just didn’t want him to get hurt again—but he hadn’t asked to go back either.
    Somebody loved Damon Stewart enough to bring his memorial a new wreath. But nobody bothered to do the same for Edwin Klein. Not