Coming Home

Cats on the Ceiling

Abigail Glass woke up around 5pm to get ready for work. Night shift was a beast but she needed the extra money and was still able to have an open schedule during the days when she needed to if she was willing to go without some sleep. She looked at the envelopes that had been dropped through the mail slot that afternoon and was surprised to find a handwritten one. Usually all she got in the mail was bills, that or junk mail anyway. The return address on the envelope was a surprise, it was from Victoria Holmes.

Tori was one of Abigail’s best friends growing up, she had missed her and their friend Melissa Bridges ever since she went away to college. They had kept in touch most of college on and off through email and text messaging. Now they were friends on f******k, but Abigail rarely had time to check in on there. She had also tried her best keep her life offline the past few years.

The last time she had seen the girls and their other friends from high school was the spring break of their senior year of college, five years ago. They had all come home and spent the week together. On the final night of spring break, Missy and her brother had thrown a party at their house. There was a lot of drinking involved and Abigail made some regrettable choices. Ever since then she found it hard to keep in touch with anyone from her hometown except her parents. Reluctantly she opened the envelope, she wasn’t sure what to expect but was relieved when she saw it was only an invitation to Tori’s wedding. She was marrying someone named Darryl next month and had written a personal note asking Abigail to come be in the wedding.

Abigail was torn, she wanted to be there for Tori, but she didn’t know if she was ready to face her past.

Abigail finished getting ready for work and called her friend Sam to make sure she had picked up Jerrod and Alissa that afternoon. Sam assured her they were fine and that they would all see her first thing in the morning after Abigail finished her shift. With that, Abigail grabbed her bag and walked out, locking the door behind her.

At the end of her shift, Abigail was bone tired. She spent half the night at the hospital trying to convince one of her patients that there were in fact no cats in the hospital and definitely none on the ceiling. The other half of the night was spent dealing with another patient who wanted to check on everything she was doing with the doctor, because as the patient had put it “she was only a nurse.”

She couldn’t have been happier to leave that morning and go pick up the twins so she could have breakfast with them before she sent them off to preschool. Abigail still didn’t know what to do with them when she went to the wedding, maybe they could stay with her parents… Overnight she had decided she would have to go, Tori was one of her best friends after all, and it had been five years. Plus, she reasoned she was overdue to bring the kids to their grandparents’ house. Of course Mr. and Mrs. Glass had come to see the twins before, but they had been begging Abigail to bring their grandchildren for a visit for years now. Abigail dialed their number as she drove to Sam's house, Jerrod and Alissa would be so excited once they found out.