Choice of Love by Norma Gibson Read Free Book Online Page A

much. Besides-
    “Oh please” Yvonne interrupted “The trip might turn out to be fun. You need a little fun Mary; you sure as hell don’t make the effort to have any in the city so the country might just be the thing you need.”
    Mary rolled her eyes “You sound like my co-workers, they all thing I’m boring”.
    “Uh, well I hate to break it you honey, but you are” Yvonne said with pity in her tone. “Hear is what’s going to happen, you are going to Oklahoma, you’re going to go to a few rodeos, and bang a hot cowboy or two.  When you get back, you are going to rub it in your jerk of an ex-boyfriend’s face. You know, the one who keeps calling you-“
    “Please, can we not talk about him” Mary whined. Why did Yvonne have to remind her of the doomed- from- the start relationship that she was ended just three months ago? She had though Justin was the perfect guy when she met him last year September at the grocery store. He was tall, dark, handsome and charming as hell. He told her he was a mechanic and he had just moved to Detroit all the way from North Carolina to start his own business.
        Mary had been impressed with his bold courage to venture so far to follow his dream. He was ambitious and good looking and seemed interested in Mary- something that she did not experience regularly. At age twenty six, Mary had her first real boyfriend. She was floating on top of the world. She thought she had had it all, a job, someone to love and someone to love her back. She had never experienced that kind of love, neither had she any good example of it growing up. Her father had run off with another woman when Mary was eight years old, and she grew up watching her mother go through a series of relationships that always ended badly. She had though a good relationship was impossible until she had met Justin.
        Their new relationship had seemed to be made in heaven, when two months into it she started to wonder why her boyfriend never invited her to his house and never took her out on a real date. They only spent time in her apartment and when she mentioned going out, he always say “Baby let’s stay in tonight, I don’t want to share you with anyone else.” Hearing that back then made Mary feel all kinds of special. Now she knew he was feeding her a huge load of crap.
        Three months into the relationship Justin had started to hit her up for money way too many times for her comfort. When she had mentioned it to her mom, she was outraged. Mary could remember he mother’s shrill voice over the phone “Child, I thought I taught you more sense than that. Don’t you be using your hard earned money to support any man!”
        Yvonne had told her to break it off with Justin immediately. But Mary had fancied herself in love, poor fool that she was. When she decided to start refusing to loan Justin money his charming personality changed so fast it gave her whiplash. He became verbally abusive, burying her already low self-esteem in to the ground. But Mary had held on to him and the hope that he would come to his senses and return to the sweet, charming man that she had met. It turned out that he was just a super-sized phony.
        It was no great surprise when Justin had dumped her unceremoniously over the phone, but it had cut her deep. The events of her first real relationship and the way it ended, had managed to murder what little life her self-esteem had.  Months after their break-up, Justin still called her phone, but she never answered.  He kept leaving messages about how he had made a big mistake and wanted her back. Mary was sure he didn’t want her back; it was her bank account that he wanted. Yvonne had attempted relentlessly to set Mary up with a few of her husband’s friends. But Mary refused to even make the effort to talk to another man.
    “Mary Lou Carpenter!” the sound of her name bought Mary back from her painful trip down memory lane. “Are you still there?” Yvonne asked,