Falling For You

**This has not been edited or proofread.**

It was a beautiful sight.

Max sat dutifully at my side, my hand resting on the top of his head as I stared at the mountains in front of me.

After my mother passed away two months ago, finally losing her battle against ovarian cancer, I packed two duffel bags of clothes, loaded Max up into my SUV, and took off on a trip across the country, living off the money I had saved for college.

I never wanted to go back to that town. It held so many memories of my mother. And yeah, memories could be great, but for me, they were heartbreaking.

They were a sore reminder that my mother had been taken away from me too soon.

At twenty-three, I’d been left to my own defenses, left to figure out how to navigate life without my mom. She’d been my rock, my confidante.

And now that she was no longer here with me, I suddenly found that the life I had planned suddenly didn’t feel like the life for me.

I didn’t want to go to college. I didn’t want to teach math to students anymore. All of the hard work I’d done to save up money so I wouldn’t have to pull out student loans was all a waste.

I’d instead used all of that money to live out of my car and to travel across the United States, visiting all of the places my mother had expressed to me she wished she’d had the chance to visit.

So, as I drove, in each place, I sprinkled a little bit of her ashes so she could finally visit every place on her bucket list. And I only hoped that she was smiling down at me from wherever she was at now.

I lightly scratched behind Max’s ear, heaving a heavy sigh. “I like it here, boy,” I quietly told him. “What about you?”

He just thumped his tail on the ground. Tears blurred my eyes as I thought of my mother – thought about how much she would have loved this place. She always talked about one day seeing the mountains and breathing in the fresh, crisp air of a true autumn season.

Max bumped his nose with my chin just as he’d been trained to do when he could sense my anxiety levels rising.

The last place I had stopped was a small town, smaller than where I’d grown up. I’d driven through here during the night and slept in a small B&B. When I’d woken up to make myself a cup of coffee this morning, I’d been blown away by the view of the mountains.

It was stunning – the kind of view you wouldn’t find anywhere else.

“I want to stay,” I said softly. I looked down at Max. It would do him good to be here, too. The field we were sitting in was filled with brown, dying grass, the leaves around us tinted with golds, oranges, yellows, and reds. I could see snow on the top of the mountains in the distance.

It was so beautiful.

“Come on, boy,” I said, walking back towards the SUV. I needed to find somewhere to stay, and then, I needed to figure out what in the world I was going to do here for work.

I was slowly driving through town when I saw it: the for-rent sign in the window of a small store squished between a restaurant and a bakery.

I quickly pulled over and parked, getting out of my car, Max following just as he always did. I wiped the dusty window with the sleeve of my hoodie so I could better read the sign.

Six hundred a month. To get the small, studio apartment above with it, it would be nine hundred a month.

It would barely make a dent in the money I’d been left by my mother.

With a small smile crossing my lips, I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and dialed the number on the paper in the window.

I believe I’d just found our new home.