Today, we are excited to kick off this Book Blitz celebrating the book birthday for Award-winning and Amazon Bestselling Author Melanie Summers' I Used to Be Fun! To celebrate this new release, we have an exclusive excerpt AND a blitz-wide giveaway to share! So... Be sure to check it out and grab your copy NOW!
Betty leaned in, her blue eyes huge behind her thick lenses. “What did you want to do with your life? Before you got distracted by having a family?”
Jess shrugged. “I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, but I’m glad I didn’t do it. The way the world is now, I think I would have hated it.”
“That’s just more bullshit.”
“Is not,” Jess said, even though it was.
Betty arched one eyebrow at her and waited.
After a few seconds, Jessica sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe I would have enjoyed being a lawyer, but I didn’t do it, so there’s no sense in wishing I had.”
“What? Do you have one foot in the grave already?”
“According to you, I do,” Jessica quipped. “But in all seriousness, I’m not about to go back to school at this age.”
“Why the hell not? You clearly don’t have anything more important to do.”
“Because I’m too old. It would be too hard to keep up. And I have a family that needs me, even if you don’t think they do.” Jessica walked over to the nearest table and started straightening the chairs. “I traded that dream for a different one, and that’s that. There’s no going back.”
“What do you think? You only get one dream per life and that’s it?” Betty raised her voice. “That’s crazy talk. You get to have lots of dreams. Sometimes more than one at once.”
“What woman has time for more than one dream at a time?” Jessica scoffed.
“The fun ones. The ones who know how to grab life by the balls and hold on. The ones who get how short the ride is and are determined to enjoy every last second.” Betty pointed a crooked finger at Jess. “The smart ones. You want to be a lawyer, be a lawyer. Or take up scuba diving or… or talk your husband into becoming swingers. I don’t know. But do something because just sitting around writing in a journal isn’t the answer. You have to get out there and really live, Jessica. Before it’s too late.”
Her words felt like they were being baked into Jessica’s soul like that chaste pink paint that would be baked onto the pig’s lips. They were there forever. “Okay, thanks. I’ll think about it.”
“No, stop thinking. Go have a big, juicy life.” Betty walked over to her table and picked up her coat and purse. “I have to go. I have a big date.”
Jess managed a smile, even though it was the last thing she wanted to do. “See you next week.”
“I hope not.”
The rest of the afternoon, Jess fumed over the conversation. It came back to her in bits and pieces, each remembered phrase irritating her even more than the last. The smart ones do. As if Jess wasn’t smart. She was plenty smart, thank you very much. She’d scored a 169 on her LSAT, and you certainly couldn’t do that if you were stupid. Although, to be fair, Betty had also said she was intelligent when she suggested Jess had been wasting her mind, which was both flattering and insulting at the same time. The fun ones. Jess knew how to have fun. Although it had been quite a while since she’d actually thought of anything fun to do. Other than watching TV shows that made her laugh. But still, Betty didn’t know that about her, so how dare she suggest Jess wasn’t fun?
Later, as she drove home, she muttered to herself, “Nobody has time to live simultaneous dream lives. Nobody. You pick a path and focus on it. And you do your best. And you find a way to be happy about it. Period.”
Jess had picked her path close to eighteen years ago, and she wasn’t about to abandon that now. That would mean abandoning her children. They still needed her, possibly more now that they were facing more complicated life issues than they had when they were eight and ten. She wasn’t about to run off and have some big, juicy life just because some old lady at the shop told her to. No way. She knew what it was like to be abandoned by a parent, and there was no way in hell she’d ever do that to her kids. No matter how miserable she was.
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