To Hell With Carpets: The Chronic Collection, #2

By Amanda Kimberley

When Lila and her family move into her grandparents' house to help care for them, she discovers that life isn't always perfect. Sometimes it can get downright messy. And that's okay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aurora Publishing
• Release date: Feb 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393013617

Amanda Kimberley

USA Today Best Selling and award-winning author Amanda Kimberley has written in various genres in the course of almost four decades. Her nonfiction blog, which focuses on the chronic disease fibromyalgia, has garnered recognition from various organizations, including Health Magazine. Naming her blog, Fibro and Fabulous, a top blog for fibro sufferers. Amanda has also written for medical magazines and sites like FM Aware, The National Fibromyalgia Association’s magazine, and ProHealth. When Kimberley is not writing nonfiction, she enjoys penning romance. Her first Furry United Coalition story, The Turtle and the Hare, earned the 2020 Summer Splash Book Awards of Ink and Scratches for Best Romance. Her Forever Series Books, Forever Friends, and Forever Bound were featured in 2015 and 2016 on the BookCountry website, a division of Penguin/Random House as editor’s picks. She has also been featured as a USA Today Happy Ever After Hot List Indie Author with Claiming My Valentine, a Best Poet of the 90’s ranking for an anthology, and has had a #1 PNR ranking with Immortal Hunger and Hearts Unleashed. Amanda Kimberley is a Connecticut native that now lives in the warmth of Northern Texas with her zoo consisting of her husky, tuxedo cat, mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, a tank of fish, two daughters, and a husband. When she is not writing you can find her cooking whole foods for her pack. She also enjoys reading, hiking, and gaming. Amanda Kimberley is a Connecticut native that now lives in the warmth of Northern Texas with her zoo consisting of her husky and cocker spaniel dogs, her tuxedo cat, two hamsters, a rabbit, a tank of fish, two daughters, and a husband. When she is not writing you can find her cooking whole foods for her pack. She also enjoys reading, hiking, and gaming.

Book preview

To Hell With Carpets

Amanda Kimberley

Copyright © 2018 by Amanda Kimberley

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

For Mom, Grandma, and Grandpa, without the support you had shown me, I don’t think I would have had the strength to write this. 

Also, for Britt and Livy, my two guardian angels in this world, thanks for always being yourselves because your presence is my light!

And finally, for my husband because you are my rock.

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Lila

2. Finn

3. Lila

4. Finn

5. Lila

6. Finn

7. Lila

8. Lila

9. Finn

10. Lila

11. Finn

12. Lila

13. Finn

14. Lila

15. Finn

Untitled

16. From the Beginning

17. The Move

About the Author

Other Books by Amanda Kimberley

Acknowledgments

It isn’t every day you come across people on the internet you have an instant connection to and that you can also work with but I’ve found the greatest friend in you, C.D. Gorri and I am so grateful for all the times I could bounce ideas off of you with this book and the other one in this growing collection.

I also want to thank all the other authors I know as not only my tribe but friends too! Thanks, P. Mattern and P.T. Macias for helping me! Without the two of you, I would have questioned my sanity!

Lila

Hell eluded me as a child because I found it almost impossible to comprehend a place in a perpetual state of fire, emotional pain, physical struggle, and torture. There were always breaks of happiness in life, so I couldn’t imagine dwelling in a place where I’d get no relief from my daily bouts of Fibromyalgia back pain and suffer from constant emotional anguish. 

And if this place called hell preyed upon you and your worst fears, I’m sure I’d come across several thousands of wasps, hornets, and carpenter bees. Not that I spent my summers in fear of going outside, but it was very rare that you’d see me out in the afternoons when bees were more than less likely to be buzzing about.

As I grew, I learned about others’ versions of hell ranging from a cold, dank, and lonely place that cut you off from interaction with all creatures to somewhere that is so entertaining, that one charges admission for ringside seats. These versions I heard were just as unique as fingerprints. 

But it wasn’t until I grew to an adult, that I saw a glimpse of what hell was truly like, and it was a far different place than anything dark that someone imagined. The reality was a horrific shock because the hell I witnessed was nothing like Dante’s Inferno or What Dreams May Come, no. My hell had ivory wall-to-wall carpeting, and it boasted perfection from one end of the house to the other until the day I moved in with my family.

The paper splay at the foot of the driveway and I went to go pick it up as quickly as I could in the dark and with a cup of black coffee in one of my hands. Normally I drink it with cream and sugar but it had been an especially long night and the only thing that would make me function was coffee so dark it could be mistaken for rocket fuel. 

As I walk back into the house, I set my cup down and pull the paper from the bag and grab all the store circulars and place them on the credenza. I then grab all the previous days advertisements from off of a section of the ivory carpet in the split-level house that my family and I have now come to call home. 

As I toss them into a garbage bag, a few coupons boasting of a huge dollar of savings at a restaurant grabbed my attention. The burger appeared to be a diabetic, colonoscopy, coronary attack waiting to happen, but I didn’t notice it for that. The yellow-tinged relief that soiled the perfection someone was trying to sell me made me almost laugh and it would have been a huge belly laugh but it was still too early in the morning for that. Sport, my adorable, but agoraphobic Cocker Spaniel, had done his normal 4 am ritual on the carpet again. 

It was tedious to keep up with cleaning up after him, but days like these, I seemed to treasure the smile he gave me by poking fun at the fakeness of what some Americans deem as food.

Sport used to love the outdoors and walking with his BFF Scout, a bull terrier mix who lived directly across the street. I had grown to love our early evening walks with Scout’s owner, a married middle-aged woman named Trina, who was a caregiver to her aging mother. 

The fresh air and the understanding conversation gave me a perspective on my own struggles with my maternal side. The days meshed into one another when I spent them caring for my mother and my grandparents, her parents. The four of us seemed inseparable, enjoying the warmth of the summer evenings and good exercise. That is until that joy Sport had got bitten out of my poor puppy the day a mean-spirited Rottweiler crossed our paths. 

It was like every morning. He was being a sport of a dog and minding his own business by keeping to the sidewalk, never straying onto the front lawn of some other dog’s territory. But the Rottweiler was defiantly different, thinking no one should walk around his neighborhood unannounced. Tearing through his restraint, he padded over to us rounding the corner of his street and then explained why we should leave through some sharp, pearly whites he displayed with proudness. 

Sport