She thought she saw a trace of sorrow flit across Bridget’s face, but just as soon as she’d spotted it, it disappeared again.
“She taught me everything I know,” Bridget said, shifting her focus back to the road ahead. “Everything.”
Somehow Amy didn’t doubt that. After all, her mother had also been the one to shape everything about the woman Amy had become. Would she be proud of her now? Or had grief already turned Amy into a massive disappointment?
She’d never know. That was the hardest part of everything.
She could remember the past. She could speculate on the present, but her mother could never be a part of her future.
Still, Amy wanted to find a way to make her proud—even if it was all only hypothetical. It was better than nothing, better than admitting that she didn’t have any family left to care about what became of her.
Chapter 3
The interment didn’t take up too much of their afternoon. The pastor recited a quick blessing; then everyone in attendance waited in line to place a brightly colored flower onto the casket.
“Birds of paradise,” Bridget explained to those who had gathered in the normally sleepy cemetery. “They were always her favorite.”
Amy simply nodded and did as she was instructed. She’d covered her mother’s grave with the traditional white lilies. Might that have been the wrong choice? Then again, were there really any right choices in these situations?
Who even knew anymore?
The Moore family funeral had proven an interesting experience, and it wasn’t even over yet. Once the burial was finished, everyone proceeded to Bridget’s father’s house for the after-party. Bright Mylar balloons were tied all around, and a large, catered buffet took up the better part of both the kitchen and the dining room.
Amy had never been here before. Bridget had always hosted the friends in her small apartment downtown, but this cozy quad-level home of her childhood felt exactly how Amy would have expected it to feel.
Like warmth and love and Bridget.
“Come with me,” Bridget said, once the friends had all stuffed themselves to contentment. She guided them upstairs to one of the bedrooms and motioned for them to head inside. Amy, for one, was grateful to be free of the older relatives and family friends who mistook her for kin as they tearfully shared their favorite memories of the deceased.
This new room was tiny but comfortable. The walls had been painted bright sunshine yellow. Various posters of previously popular musicians and actors covered one wall in its entirely, showcasing a messy homemade collage.
“Let me guess,” Nichole muttered, walking straight up to one of the posters and running a finger along its subject’s jawline. “This was your room growing up.”
Bridget plopped down onto the unmade twin bed that sat along the opposite wall. “How’d you know?” she asked with a giggle.
Hazel, who was a successful interior designer, glanced around longer than the rest of them before declaring, “Nice high ceilings. This room has good bones. If not the best artwork.” She sat beside Bridget and wrapped an arm around her with a smile.
“Why’d you bring us up here?” Amy asked in a way she hoped would come across as tender and not judgmental.
“To help me with a project,” Bridget answered, shaking loose from Hazel’s arm and trotting toward the closet.
They all waited while she rummaged through the messy stacks of clothes and boxes until she finally found the one she wanted.
Bridget removed the lid to reveal a giant stack of glossy photos. “Some of these are the originals, but most I had printed at the pharmacy earlier this week.” She pushed the box toward Amy, then returned to the closet.
Amy glanced down at the messy collection in her hands. She recognized the bad hair and loud patterns of the eighties—an era before Bridget or even Amy had been born—but she also saw photos of an adorable, chubby-faced baby girl toddling after her big brothers and pictures of Bridget’s mother before the cancer had ravaged her body. Such a strange mix of memories, especially seeing them all overlapping like this.
A knock sounded on the door, drawing everyone’s focus as they waited for Bridget to offer permission to enter her inner sanctum.
“Come in!” she cried over her shoulder.
Hazel’s boyfriend, Keith, let himself into the room, a giant, floofy puff held tightly to his chest with one arm. “Sorry to interrupt, but this guy really, really wanted in.”
The brown Pomeranian in his arms panted with excitement, his long pink tongue lolling from the side of his mouth.
“Oh, Teddy,” Bridget scolded, abandoning the search of the closet to scoop the dog into her arms. “You really can’t live without me for one second?”
Teddy whined happily and licked her face as if it were the tastiest treat in the whole entire world.
Bridget relented with a laugh. “Fine, you can stay. You, on the other hand . . .” She shoved Keith back toward the door with her free arm, causing a lock of his sandy blond hair to shuffle loose and fall onto his forehead. “You need to go. It’s nothing personal. It’s just I’d rather it be only us girls for this.”
Hazel rose and gave her boyfriend a quick peck on the cheek. “I’ll catch up with you after girl time, okay?” she promised.
“It’s fine. Do what you need to do,” he said good-naturedly before disappearing again.
Bridget handed Teddy off to Hazel. “Can you hold him for me? I don’t want him getting his noseprint all over these pictures. Or worse, trying to eat my scrapbooking supplies.”
“Is that what we’re doing?” Nichole asked. Her arms were folded across her chest as she regarded the messy closet with poorly concealed impatience.
“Yup,” Bridget answered pertly. “We’re going to craft the big book of Mom.”
“And share the stories related to each photo?” Amy asked. That seemed like a nice way to commemorate Mrs. Moore. Now the idea of an after-party at least made a little more sense.
“Nope,” Bridget said, shaking her head. “No talking, just cutting, pasting, and bedazzling. It’s the best way to keep everything together for anyone who wants to look at them in the future.”
Amy wanted to argue, but what was the point? If this was how Bridget wanted to remember her mom, then she would be there to support her.
“Can we at least have some music?” Nichole suggested.
“Good idea,” Bridget said before dropping her phone into the Bluetooth speaker on her nightstand. A playlist of hits from Bridget’s high school days began to play on full blast, eliciting a groan from Nichole.
“Oh, joy,” she mumbled. “Now I get to look at him and listen to him at the same time.” She shot the wall of posters a dirty look, which caused Bridget to giggle again.
“You know you love it,” Bridget said as she transferred the last of her crafting supplies from the closet into the center of the room. “Now, everyone take a seat and decide what your job will be.”
A short while later, Amy, Nichole, and Bridget had formed a scrapbooking assembly line. Amy’s job was to cut the photos into fun shapes. Bridget then applied glue, and Nichole stuck them onto the pages of the previously blank book. It didn’t escape Amy’s notice that Bridget had volunteered herself for the one job that didn’t involve looking at the pictures, but she chose not to mention it and ruin her friend’s good mood.
Hazel, the most artistic of the bunch, was tasked with keeping Teddy out of the way while also providing Nichole with creative supervision. “Is there any particular organizational pattern you want to follow for this?” she asked.
Bridget hummed along to the upbeat pop music as she smeared a fresh coat of glue onto a picture that Amy had cut into the shape of a heart. “Our life never was very orderly,” she admitted. “We just took each day as it came.”
Nobody said anything, waiting to see if Bridget had more that she needed to get off her chest.
“I just want all the pictures in the book. It doesn’t matter how you organize them. I t
rust you.” Bridget offered a sweet smile, but Amy saw right through it.
“You know you don’t have to be fake with us, right?” Nichole said, failing to accept the photo Bridget handed her way. “You can talk about what you’re feeling.”
Bridget sighed. “What I’m feeling is that I need to finish this project, and I need my friends to help me. Is that okay with you?”
“Of course, B,” Amy said, inserting herself right in the middle of what could easily escalate into a fight. “Whatever you want. Today’s your day.”
She picked up her scissors again and tried not to notice the way the people in the photos smiled and laughed as if nothing bad could ever happen. Had Bridget’s mother known her life would be cut painfully short? Had she suspected her daughter would want to cover their memories in rhinestones and washi tape without taking a single moment to revisit the good times they’d shared?
That was when she finally got it.
This scrapbooking exercise wasn’t meant to be fun.
It was a second burial.
Chapter 4
Bridget wrapped her arms tight around Amy, who accepted the windpipe-crushing hug with grace. “Are you sure you can’t stay for the bonfire?” she asked with a pout.
“Tomorrow’s my last day off before going back to school,” Amy explained once Bridget finally let her go and moved on to hug the others. “I still have a ton of work to do to make sure I’m ready for the kids.”
“Lucky,” Bridget muttered. “I missed the start of the new college semester by nearly a month. At this rate, I’ll be, like, thirty before I finally get my DVM.”
“Hey,” Nichole scolded. “There is nothing wrong with being, like, thirty.”
“Call me if you need anything,” Hazel said, giving Bridget a quick peck on the cheek. It seemed she had become the de facto peacekeeper now that Amy had dropped the ball.
Maybe that was the best place to start—getting back to normal with her friends—so that everything else could get back to normal, too.
“You can always call me, too,” Amy added. “Anytime, night or day.”
Bridget rolled her eyes at their concern. “Guys, I’m fine. Seriously. Stop worrying so much.”
Of course, this declaration only made Amy worry more. After a couple tense hours scrapbooking, Bridget had dragged everyone outside to play fetch with Teddy in the deep snow; then they took him on a walk, packed up the buffet, and tidied the kitchen. Always moving. Always doing something. No time for mourning or accepting the tearful condolences of her other guests.
It all made Amy dizzy. Exhausted, too.
Despite their frantic coming and going, the world outside stood quiet and still. Thick layers of snow covered every visible surface. Late January in Alaska was brutal, but being native to the state, Amy knew how to make the best of the long winters and the impossibly long days that came with summer. The hardest part was switching between the two. Maybe that was part of what was going on with Bridget. She didn’t know how to mourn, to transition from death to life, so she simply chose not to.
Of course, poor Keith had been abandoned to the relatives while Bridget whipped her other friends back and forth all over the house, yard, and neighborhood. As he drove them all back to the church to collect their cars now, Amy couldn’t help but ask how he and the others felt about Bridget’s oddly cheery demeanor that day.
“I get why you’re worried. I do,” Nichole said. “But it’s not like Bridget is acting any different from normal. She’s always giggly, bouncy, happy-go-lucky.”
Hazel weighed in next. Her voice was hard to hear as it drifted back from the front seat. “She’ll reach out if she needs us. She promised she would.”
Despite remaining separate from them all day, only Keith shared Amy’s concern. “Everyone handles the loss in their own way. From what you’re saying, it sounds like maybe Bridget isn’t ready to deal with it yet. Eventually, she will, though. And, luckily, she has great friends to help her through it.”
“Yes, she does,” Hazel said, rubbing her hand back and forth over Keith’s shoulder.
The car fell quiet, the only sounds the tires crunching over ice and snow while the heater struggled to provide the necessary warmth. It was such an extreme shift from the boisterousness of Bridget’s party that Amy almost had to laugh.
“It feels like an era ended today,” she confessed, wondering if her friends felt it, too—if any of them felt stuck the way she did these days. “It makes me a little sad.”
“Better sad than sad and guilty,” Nichole shot back. “Every day I thank God my dad got better, but then I wonder why he was spared when none of your parents were.”
“Hey, there’s no guilt here,” Hazel said soothingly with a soft, clucking sound. “We’re so happy that you don’t have to go through this, too.”
Nichole sighed, a gesture that angered Amy given the circumstances. “It feels like I missed something important,” she mumbled. “Like I’m out of the club.”
Amy wrinkled her nose, trying so hard to hold back the words she already felt forming in her chest. No. Nichole had taken this too far. She needed to say something. “Are you actually looking for sympathy because your dad didn’t die? Please tell me that you’re not wishing he did so that you’d fit in better.”
Nichole sucked air in through her teeth, eyeing Amy with a mix of shock and sorrow. “No, it’s not that. I—”
But Amy wasn’t falling for it. “You what? You want us to feel sorry for you when any one of us would kill—kill!—to be in your position?”
“Jeez. Relax, Amy,” Hazel said, turning around in the front seat to shoot daggers her way. “That’s not what Nichole meant, and you know it.”
“Then Nichole should say what she means,” Amy spat. “Between Bridget acting like nothing’s wrong and Nichole acting like everything is, I’m tapped out. At least Bridget isn’t begging for us to feel sorry for her good luck.”
Nichole sniffled into the same tissue Amy had loaned her earlier. Had she really made the toughest of her friends cry? Just as she’d suspected earlier, things certainly wouldn’t ever be normal again.
Regardless, it wasn’t like Amy to be cruel. Even when people deserved it, she still had a smile and kind word for everyone. The last thing she wanted to do was lash out at her friends, to push them away.
Nichole, however, beat her to an apology. “I’m sorry,” she said with another sniff.
“Me, too,” Amy parroted. She was sorry for how she’d acted, but was she really sorry about what she’d said? Her anger with Nichole had been festering ever since her father got the clean-for-now bill of health. Would that rage have eventually consumed her if not given an outlet tonight?
“There, see?” Hazel cooed. “That’s better.”
Amy was getting sick of everyone saying things were better. That word was tossed around so much lately, it had started to lose its meaning. Better than horrible could still be pretty awful. Better than dying could still be dead.
Amy didn’t want better. She wanted normal, to go back to the life she’d always known and once truly loved. But would going back be disrespectful to her mother’s memory?
So many questions swirled around her brain, and not a single one of them came with an answer.
“I’m sorry,” she told Nichole again, and this time she knew she meant it. “I’m just having a hard time with all this.”
Hazel turned to look over her shoulder. “We all are, but we’re here for each other. We’re here for you.”
“It’s okay. Are you worried about going back to work, Ames?” Nichole asked hesitantly. It took a lot to disturb the resident group cynic, but apparently Amy’s little outburst had done just that.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. Honestly, it was tough to know what she felt these days. It all changed so rapidly, like a kaleidoscope of negative emotions. One second angry. The next, devastated. Afraid. Sad. Round and round her feelings turned, never producing the exact same pattern again.
Hazel nodded as if this all made perfect sense to her. “You’ll feel better once you get back into your routine.”
Nichole silently grasped Amy’s hand and gave it a squeeze.
“Well, there’s only one way to find out, I guess,” Amy said at last.
As bossy and pedantic as she found Hazel to be sometimes, she desperately hoped her friend was right. She just couldn’t keep living like this.
Amy would be back at school in a little more than twenty-four hours, and that was exactly how long she had to figure things out. She needed to commit to being strong, kind, the same person she’d once been. She’d liked that person.
This new Amy, though? She wasn’t so sure.
Chapter 5
Monday snuck up on Amy awfully fast. Had it really been a year since Amy last arrived at school ready to guide her students through a new semester?
Yes, an entire year had passed, during which it had been her only job to care for—and then mourn—her mother. She felt strange now as she clomped through the halls in her new winter boots. The new dress she wore had bright fish and bubbles patterned on the skirt. She’d paired it with navy leggings and a wooly cardigan. At least some part of her would appear cheerful for the children as they adjusted to their new teacher and figured out the new layout of the room.
Do it for the kids, she reminded herself for the hundredth time that morning. She didn’t have any more time to grapple with her personal issues. The children needed her to be at her best, and they needed that now. Today.
Meanwhile, what Amy needed was a lesson plan for life, or at least for overcoming grief. Maybe she could grab some of her lunches with the school counselor this week, but right now she had a job to do—a noble one at that.
She’d already dialed back her usual enthusiasm, but she had plenty of time to crank it up again. As long as she did a good job from the start, she could do a great job when she was ready to offer more of herself.
For example, each semester Amy decorated her classroom according to a unit they’d be studying in the coming months. Normally, she spent weeks planning the theme and hunting local dollar and craft stores for the perfect supplies to transform their otherwise plain four walls into something spectacular. This time, however, she hadn’t been able to do anything more than string some sparkling fairy lights around the reading corner and adorn it with two new bean bag chairs she’d snagged on clearance at the local Target.
The Sunday Potluck Club Page 2
