by Katy Paige
After Christmas Eve services, the girls had stayed up as late as they could waiting for Santa, but when they couldn’t keep their eyes open anymore, they dozed off, and their dad carried them up to bed. Sam, his sisters, their husbands, and his parents gathered in the living room, his dad occasionally stoking a roaring fire, trading stories of Christmases past and passing Colin around to loving arms.
Christmas morning dawned white with sunshine on a new-fallen snow, which delighted the girls almost more than Santa’s bounty, and the day was spent opening gifts, sledding down the backyard hill, and eating and drinking way too much. Colleen and Muirin finally left for their respective homes after dinner on Christmas Day. And Sam would head back to the city in the morning.
He was standing on the back patio looking up at the sky when his mother joined him.
“Good night for it,” she mused, pulling a thick, wool sweater around her shoulders and buttoning it up against the cold. “It’s clear.”
Margaret Gunderson Kelley was still an attractive woman at sixty. She wore her white hair in a neat pageboy held back by a variety of hair bands and kept fit by taking long walks with Sam’s dad every morning.
“Not like Montana.”
“Well,” she said, winking at Sam, “nowhere’s like Montana.” She nudged her son in the side with her elbow. “So, youngest child, did something happen while you were there?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Aunt Lisabet told me what you did for Kristian. The wedding. Standing proxy. Which, by the way, it would have been nice to hear from you instead of her.” She chucked him lightly in the arm before continuing. “Still, I’m proud of you for helping him out. What a nice boy I raised.”
“You did okay,” Sam conceded, grinning straight ahead in the semidarkness.
“But you’re not acting like yourself. Coming home early for Christmas? Staying an extra day? Oh, I’m not saying I don’t love every second. I do. We all loved having you here longer this year. But it’s not really you, son.”
He cringed at her words. “I’m sorry about that, Mom.”
“Oh, honey, I’m not complaining. You work hard, you play hard. Your job means everything to you.” She seemed to hesitate, then continued: “I don’t want to pry, but I gather from Colleen that you’re not with Pepper anymore.”
“Didn’t work out.” He turned his head to smile at her. “Don’t start crying, now. I know how much you liked her.”
She chuckled, shaking her head. “Fair enough. She wasn’t my favorite. I wanted more for you. I wanted something deep and lasting and—” She paused, then took his arm and led him to the patio steps. She sat down and pulled him down beside her on the cold, rough concrete. “So it’s not Pepper.”
He shook his head. “Not Pepper. And about my job,” he started, “don’t fall over in a dead faint, but I’m thinking about quitting. Downsizing the whole work thing.”
His mother’s head snapped up. “Should I be worried?”
“Nah. Just thinking it’s time for a change.”
“Okay…it’s not Pepper, and it’s not your job. So what happened in Montana, Sam?”
He sighed, rubbing his cold hands together. “I met a girl.”
“You don’t say.”
“It’s that obvious?”
“Samuel Gunderson Kelley, you wear your heart on your sleeve. Always have. Always will. And when I see my boy this melancholy, I think—no, I know—it’s got to be about a girl.”
“I fell hard, Mom.” He sighed loudly, leaning forward to place his elbows on his knees. “I liked her. I really, really liked her.”
“Sounds like maybe you more than liked her, Sam. What went wrong?”
“I asked her to come here.”
His mother groaned softly. “I guess that didn’t go over too well?”
“She won’t leave Montana. And I mean, I love Montana, just like you do, but—”
“Oh, sweetheart, no.” She chuckled, putting her hand on his arm to stop him. “No, no. I don’t love Montana.”
“Of course you do.” Sam looked at her, confusion wrinkling his forehead. “W-We went back. Every year. Twice a year. We always went back…”
“I love my sister. I love Aunt Lisabet and your cousins. But Montana? No. Oh, Sam, I was—I was glad to go. Relieved. I left cheerfully. An opportunity to see the big city with a man I loved? It was a dream come true.”
“No, no. Wait, Mom. You left with Dad, but—but…”
She was shaking her head gently, but her eyes said it all. “Sam. You love Montana. Always have since you were a little boy. For me? It was about family. Not the place. The people. Only the people.”
Sam’s shoulders slumped as he processed this new truth. He had always thought of Montana as “in his blood,” an affection he had almost taken for granted as inherited—like brown eyes or reddish hair—from his mother. To learn that she harbored no love for Montana meant that his affection for it was individual. It was not a part of her but solidly a part of him. Not in his blood, perhaps, but firmly in his heart, of his own choice, of his own making.
“Lunkhead.” Margaret hugged herself tighter against the cold. “You pressured her to come to Chicago, huh?”
“Yeah. I thought she’d at least consider it. I bought her airline tickets. At the time, it seemed like the only way to be”—he sighed again, angry with himself—“together. I was mad when she said no. I was hurtful. I said…unforgivable things.”
His mother nodded slowly. “Unforgivable, huh?”
“Feels like it.”
“And you haven’t spoken since?”
“Not a peep.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes before Margaret nudged him. “Sam, here’s what I don’t get. You love Montana. If you want to be with her, why wouldn’t you go there?”
“My life is here. My job, my apartment, friends, family. She comes from this ridiculously tiny town. I couldn’t make the money there that I make here. What would I even do in some small town? I couldn’t be happy there.”
She looked at him. “Is it the only town in the entire state of Montana where she could be happy? That seems unlikely.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask her to go anywhere else. I pitched Chicago. It didn’t work out.”
“You know…Bozeman’s a great town. Plenty of work there. Helena. Laurel. Great Falls is a nice little city for people who like Montana.”
“She likes Great Falls,” he said, thinking about her original plan to make a life for herself there. “She went to school there. But she chose Gardiner over Great Falls.”
“I see.” She pulled her sweater tighter around her. “I think I need more information. Tell me about this girl.”
“Her name’s Jenny.” He sighed, shaking his head. “It’s no use, Mom. I said terrible things when I left and—”
“Samuel. Tell me about the girl.”
He put his hands on his knees and looked up at the sky. He got a good fix on her face in his head and smiled in the darkness. His voice was soft and tender when he started speaking, like how one’s voice sounds in one’s own head, like a stream of consciousness.
“Her name’s Jenny Lindstrom. She’s twenty-four. She drinks glögg on Christmas Eve. She doesn’t like it that I drink beer, but she says ‘men will have their vices,’ and she can live with that one. Her mother actually used to say that, but she passed away, and Jenny misses her. Really badly. So badly she needs to be near her family.
“She teaches high school science, and she has a puppy, which is ridiculous, right? A schoolmarm with a puppy. She knows all this stuff about the stars and points out the constellations to anyone who will listen. She quotes Shakespeare and C. S. Lewis out of the blue. She said she’s a frustrated English teacher inside.
“The principal at her school, Paul? He really likes her. He’s young and good-looking and best friends with her brother. She’s got three brothers, by the way, and they’re all like these huge, blond stereotypical Swedish guy
s. Anyway, she says she doesn’t like Principal Paul, but I’m sure he’s wearing her down.
“She’s really beautiful, Mom. She has bright-blue eyes and blonde hair, and she organizes the Christmas pageant and makes a mean omelet. She draws concentric circles on the table with her finger when she’s thinking about something. She gets all mad when she thinks something, or someone, is wrong. But she knows how to say she’s sorry, and when she does, she means it.
“She blushes all the time. I mean, everything embarrasses her, but she’s so tough too, Mom. Like really honest and straightforward, and she has this amazing backbone. You know, youngest of four with three older brothers. She gives it back, you know? She’s…surprising.
“And smart. Really smart. She knows everything about Yellowstone Park, practically grew up in the park. Her father’s a tour guide in Yellowstone. She cleans closets at her church when they need a hand, and she drives the girliest light-blue SUV I’ve ever seen. She has these beat-up cowgirl boots she wears all the time.
“She braids her hair with flowers for Midsummer just like her mom did. Just like you and Aunt Lisabet and the girls. She likes Christmas movies and hot cocoa and going to the symphony. She loves little kids and wants her own someday. You should have seen her face hearing about the girls and Colin, seeing their pictures on my phone.
“She’s got the best heart of anyone I’ve ever met. She hated that we took the vows for Kris and Ingrid. It was tearing her apart because she thinks you should only say wedding vows once to one person in your life…but she did it anyway because she promised Ingrid, and she believes in keeping a promise to someone she loves, and…and…”
His voice trailed off, lost in the memory of their vows. He had shut down those memories at all costs since returning home, because they were the most visceral of the moments he spent with Jenny. He couldn’t bear to remember. But now the floodgates were open, and he closed his eyes against the intense longing that accompanied the memory—her eyes searching his so fiercely across the table for comfort, for support, for—
“Sam?”
“Love,” he breathed in a trance, saying the words out loud for the first time. “I love her, Mom. I am totally in love with her.”
“Yes,” she whispered, “you are.”
Uncertainty and panic made him speak faster. “How can I be in love with her when I only knew her for a weekend?”
“Oh, Sam. There’s no rulebook. There’s no rhyme or reason to love. No logic. No checklist. For some people, it takes a lifetime to find someone, for others, a weekend. For me? A week. You got to know her very well in only a few days. And Sam,” she said, putting her arm around his shoulders, “she sounds worth knowing. Does she love you too?”
He rubbed his jaw with his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know. She had feelings for me, I know that for sure. She told me. I could see…” He closed his eyes tightly, reviewing their final conversation in his head. “I think I might have blown it, Mom. At the end, I-I might have—”
“Sam?”
“Hmmm?” He looked up at her, searching her face for hope.
She took his cheeks between her cold hands and smiled at him tenderly. “Sam, when you finally find what you want, you have to claim it. No matter what. Go back to Montana. Go to Choteau or Great Falls or Gardiner. Go wherever you need to go. Figure it out. Don’t give up on her yet.”
***
He opened his laptop and let it warm up for a moment, pouring himself a beer. After he wrote the email, he would pack a bag, and not just with a change of clothes this time; he planned to stay for a few days, at least. He’d drive out to Midway in the morning and make his way to Great Falls, probably via Minneapolis. It wasn’t so bad by plane.
He sat down on his black leather sofa, pulled the laptop onto his lap, and double-clicking on his email icon. He stared at the screen for a moment, thinking about Kristian so far away from Ingrid, so far away from home. How do I start? He hadn’t written to Kris since the brief email he’d sent from the Billings airport to tell him he was a married man. Just start typing, man. It’ll come to you.
Chapter 11
When Jenny lost her mother, the sorrow she felt had been overwhelming—paralyzing, even—and her only balm had been the company of her father and brothers. They had come together in unified sadness, negotiating their movements like severely sunburned people sharing a small space, careful not to touch one another, careful not to touch the awful red rawness of their blistered skin. They ate dinner together every night, occasionally in total silence, finding the only possible solace in the common, unspoken heartache that set them apart from the rest of the living, breathing, buzzing world. Being around other people unaffected by their visceral loss took such a lion’s share of their daily energy, it was a relief to be quiet with one another at the day’s end. Their fellowship of sorrow carried them through those first dark days.
Gradually, Jenny found, with relentless insistence, life demanded that those still living move forward. They spoke more, until they all laughed together one night—more than one of them feeling guilty over their giggles. Little by little, their sorrow became a shared life experience and was woven, bit by bit, into the tapestry of their family. Daily supper became twice-weekly supper, as other commitments and obligations infringed on the family time that became less and less crucial, and finally turned into a Sunday supper as regular life resumed. Red and raw was pink again, healing, and they were living and breathing and buzzing with the rest of the world again.
Silence was replaced by stories of their daily lives, bickering and teasing. The five lives that emerged covered with new skin were changed; they had survived the loss together, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were tougher for it. They were scarred. Fear could still permeate moments of Jenny’s quiet grief, however bearable now. Unbearable would be losing one of them again.
Sam wasn’t a member of her family, which had led her to believe losing him would be bearable.
She was wrong.
When she lost her mother, she read a quote from C. S. Lewis that resonated with her: “Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.” Lewis was just as right now as he had been then, and the passage resonated with Jenny all over again:
Every moment was surrendered to Sam’s absence.
The very worst thing about the week after the vows was that after this loss—the loss of Sam—Jenny didn’t have a fellowship of sorrow with whom to share her sadness and confusion. Her loneliness was exquisite, unparalleled in her life, and thoroughly exhausting. Too much had been lost all at once: her simple, satisfying life; her romantic innocence; her sexual dormancy; saying wedding vows aloud…and all these crucial life changes shared one vital, common element. Sam.
She missed him.
Jenny wasn’t raised to be the sort of person to neglect her responsibilities merely because she was harboring personal heartache; she was at school an hour early every day to prepare her lessons and stayed an hour after to straighten her desk and classroom.
She worked on the program for the annual concert and attended all the rehearsals, helping the senior girls choose their carols and the music teacher coach the freshman and sophomore choruses through their pieces, which included several solos and hand motions. She directed the janitor on how she wanted the risers arranged and brought in evergreens cut from a local area of woods to decorate the cafeteria, where they would hold the concert, festively.
She was at church every Wednesday evening to organize the little ones for the pageant. She wiped runny noses and sorted out doves and baby angels, wise men and shepherds. She spent nights at home sewing new costumes until her fingers bled, making halos from wire, white ribbon, and silver feathers with a leaky, angry glue gun that singed her fingers. She crate-trained Casey with a dogged tenacity
until the puppy was allowed to wander around Jenny’s apartment for limited amounts of time without having an accident. She spent all day Sunday with her father at his small house outside of town, making elaborate Sunday suppers, straightening his kitchen cabinets, and folding his laundry.
She had never been so busy before, but to her frustration, nothing filled that gaping hole of aching loneliness in her life. At night, she drew her knees to her chest in bed, remembering Sam’s smile, seeing his face, hearing his voice, replaying his words, yearning for his warmth, his arms, his hands, his breath, his soft lips, his teasing grin, their easy banter. She would cross her arms over her chest and hold herself, remembering his eyes holding hers across the conference table at the courthouse, burning through her to brand her heart until it wasn’t hers anymore. And finally, she would weep until she succumbed, mercifully, to sleep.
***
That first week, she didn’t see anyone socially, except for one very tearful cappuccino with Maggie one night as she was closing. Maggie must have noticed Jenny swiping at her eyes as Jenny and Casey made their way back from their evening walk, because she had unlocked the door of the café, stuck her head out, and called to Jenny before she could enter the door to her apartment. “Jen! Coffee!”
While Casey scampered joyfully around the empty, dimly lit café, Jenny sat at the coffee bar miserably as Maggie made them two after-hour cappuccinos. Then Maggie leaned on the counter and listened as Jenny spilled her heart out.
“Maggie, this just hurts so much,” she finally sniffled, wiping her eyes with a napkin.
“But he wants you, Jen. You refuse to go to Chicago, but you’re miserable here. Maybe you should just go. Make it clear it’s a visit to see him only, and you’d never consider movin’ there. Maybe you’d even like it. Who knows?”
“It wouldn’t be any good.” Jenny had stirred her coffee, watching the cheerful white foam dissolve into the depths of the cup until it was all a murky brown. “You know when you see two people on a reality show? And they’re thrown together in some unlikely circumstance on a deserted island or something, right? And you watch them fall in love, but it’s not real. When real life starts up again and the show’s over, they try to force each other into their old lives, and it all crumbles. All the magic is somehow lost.”
