I folded my arms. “Including you?”
She pinned me with an amused, come on sort of look. “Remember when you were on the cover of the Lindenbach Herald?”
My cheeks warmed a little, and I prayed they weren’t pink. “Sure.”
“I didn’t know a single girl who didn’t have that picture of you stashed somewhere in her bedroom.”
With a laugh, I turned for the cabinets to retrieve a couple of cups, knowing my cheeks were pink. The photo was one of me on the field after the homecoming game, helmet in my hand and a smile on my face the size of the state. I was a sweaty mess, my hair wet and unruly, my gaze somewhere off toward the stands, the picture of triumph.
I didn’t know that boy, didn’t remember him. I wondered with no small amount of longing whether or not he lived somewhere inside of me still or if he was gone forever. The call for him into the cavern of my chest echoed in the empty space.
“Fifteen years,” she said in wonderment from behind me. “I almost can’t believe it.”
“No amount of time will be enough to convince me to go to a reunion. I’d rather eat a bucket of rusty nails.”
“I’m sure Janelle Jones would hold you to that if she thought it’d convince you to come to her event.”
“I don’t get it,” I said, turning again to lean back against the counter where the coffee was nearly finished brewing. “Janelle Jones runs the choir at church and sees half our class there every Sunday. You can’t take three steps in this town without bumping into somebody you went to school with. I’m not interested in going to a party to relive the glory days.”
“To be fair, you’re not interested in going to any sort of party, regardless of the occasion.”
“That,” I noted, “is a hundred percent true.”
When she laughed, her eyes fell to her hands as they set the invitation on a stack of random papers that had accumulated there. She didn’t speak, just smiled sweetly for a moment.
“I’m sorry for all the commotion today,” I said, turning for the coffee pot. “I hope you didn’t have anything to do today.”
“Oh, I … nothing that can’t wait thirteen minutes.”
At something in her tone, I snuck a look at her and found her smaller, her eyes cast down.
“I didn’t mean to intrude.”
Her smiled waned. “No, it’s okay.” With a breath and straightening of her spine, she said, “I was going to see Drew. Today would have been his twenty-ninth birthday.”
I stopped, silent for a second. “I’m sorry, Daisy.”
But she waved me off. “It’s all right. It’s been more than ten years, after all.”
“Does that make it easier? Time?”
“In some ways. Sometimes it feels like something that happened to someone else. Sometimes, it feels like the only thing that’s ever happened. But maybe it’s different. I was just a kid when he died.”
“Those years don’t feel like we were kids. High school, I mean.”
“No, they don’t,” she agreed. “It feels like I’ve always been a grown up. That every decision I’ve made was with the knowledge I have now. Time just doesn’t make sense sometimes. I can’t tell you how many times I think about the call I got when he died. Probably one out of every five calls we get on the home line, I think it’s his mom to tell me he’s gone. Mama said the same thing about when Daddy died.”
“How often do you visit him?”
She glanced at her hands, then back up at me with a brave face on. “Not often enough. It’s always strange, disorienting. I live in this world, in my life now, but once upon a time, everything was different. I had to make new dreams, new memories. But when I go there, when I sit with him, I’m eighteen again and all those dreams are as fresh as they were back then.” Her gaze fell to her fingers again. “We all go through stages, and the change that comes between those stages are markers. But when that change is marked by losing someone you love …” She shook her head. “The gap may be shorter because the change happened in a heartbeat. But the rift has no bottom. Crossing it is easy enough. But going back to that other side is always overwhelming.”
I considered that for a moment, agreeing with every word. No one had ever put it so succinctly, and I felt understood for the first time in a long time. “I hate when people say they’re sorry, but it’s what I want to say now, to you. I don’t have other words for it. It’s just that I … I understand, in my way, and I hate that you feel it too.”
“I know you do.”
“How do you live with it?”
She met my eyes and held them. “What else is there to do? It’s a part of me, I’ve come to accept that. There’s no getting rid of it, no forgetting. So you make room for that pain, let it settle in for the long haul. Acceptance. I guess that’s what it is.”
“But how’d you find it?”
She considered, her eyes on her fingers as she toyed with a placemat. “I think maybe it found me.”
A fire, hungry and hot, consumed my heart—I wanted it to find me. Dad would have known how, having lost Mom so long ago. But he was gone too. All I had were my thoughts to guide me, and those were hostile. Always.
No one understood, except perhaps her.
I opened my mouth to press her for more, but the egg timer went off, ending the conversation with a jolt. I moved toward the racket and called Sophie’s name loud enough for it to echo in the kitchen.
She popped around the corner where she’d apparently been hiding with what was supposed to be an innocent smile on her face.
“Come on and get your cookies,” I said, pulling on an oven mitt.
“Give Daisy the big one,” she commanded.
With a glance of acknowledgement to Daisy, I said, “I sure will.”
For once, I hated that timer instead of being grateful for its interruption.
And I did my very best not to consider what that meant.
10
THAT FEELING
DAISY
The sun had barely crested the horizon, but I’d been up for hours.
Rather than lay in the dark until my alarm went off, I’d hauled myself out of bed and got dressed, heading out to do my morning chores a little early. Since it was just a stall muck day and I didn’t have to groom the horses, I’d decided on a ride, hoping to clear my head. For the last hour, I’d ridden my mare Gretchen through our property in the pale early light, the valleys of hills thick with fog and the grass shining with dew.
Gretchen’s breath puffed visible from her nostrils as we clipped down a hill and up another, and when we reached the crest, I pulled her to a stop. For a moment, we stood looking out over the land, across patches of trees and stretches of pasture. Buttery sunshine kissed the end of the world, a new beginning to a brand new day.
It was around my tenth birthday when Daddy’s mare had Gretchen. It was the first birth I’d ever seen on the farm, a long, terrifying moment that stretched between life and death. Or at least that was how it felt as a child, the weight of life and the delicate deliverance of it overwhelming me. When Gretchen stood up on wobbly legs, it was followed by the collective sigh of relief that everyone survived. At that age, I hadn’t lost many things that I loved.