No Place I'd Rather Be

by Cathy Lamb

  Gisela had once heard that family members come and get you to bring you up to heaven. Now she knew it to be true.

  Her family parted and she saw Oliver, her beloved husband, her Montana Man, tall and strong and young again, smiling. He wrapped her up in a hug and kissed her. Her heart skipped a few more beats. He could still do that to her! Her heart skipped again. And again. She loved him so. She gaped down at herself. Why, she was in her pretty dark blue dress with the blue hat and white ribbon. She tucked her thick brown hair behind her ear. How young she felt!

  “I have missed you so much, Gisela.” Oliver kissed her hand, “The love of my life. Are you ready?”

  Gisela Gobenko Martindale nodded. She tipped her head back and laughed. “I am, Oliver. I am.”

  And she was.

  * * *

  It seemed that everyone in Kalulell was at my grandma’s funeral. People walked in crying and did not stop.

  We held it at the armory. We made cakes that we thought Grandma would appreciate: a cake in the shape of the log cabin she had built with my granddad. With fondant we added the lasso on the front deck, a sun weather vane on top, their cowboy hats, the wagon wheel, lots of windows made out of spun sugar, a red door, and red geraniums.

  We made a cake with red geraniums made from icing, and we made Ida and Esther’s black forest gâteau with cherries, German apple cake, Kuchen bars with vanilla custard, and raspberry tortes. We made a white sheet cake and then used icing to re-create five of her flowered scarves, to bring beauty in. We cried while we baked. It was Martindale Cake Therapy, our tears becoming salt in the recipes.

  My mother, my sister, and I spoke at the service about her dignity, her grace, her love, and the enormous courage it took to continue living after she had lost her entire family to the Holocaust and a bombing in London. We told many funny stories, too, because people needed to be reminded of her humor and her laughter. I had a hole in my heart when I spoke about her. I knew that hole would be with me for life, but I also knew it would be filled with my grandma’s love and wisdom, too. She was the guiding light of our whole family.

  Mrs. Gisela would always, always be missed.

  She knew how to heal people in the natural way.

  Epilogue

  August 2015

  Kalulell, Montana

  Olivia Martindale

  Chloe married Zane. She lost sixty pounds. “Grief pounds gone,” she said. She also got the “boob reduction job so the girls won’t get in the way of target practice.” Then she had twin girls. “They’re trouble. Pure trouble. And I like ’em that way.”

  Kyle graduated from high school early and attended art school. He now has a popular studio and gallery in town. He lets people come and watch him while he works so they can “make my acquaintance and I can get to know them.” He still draws people having bad days. He is dating Natasha Jefferson, the girl he first drew at school with eyes like a black hole with azure and jade. She understands, respects, and loves Kyle. “Natasha is enlightenment,” he told me. “I respect her brain.”

  My mother is dating a man named Martin O’Lear. He owns an Internet company, but lives here. He has asked her many times to marry him. “Give me a lobotomy before giving me another husband” is her motto.

  Jace and I were off by one.

  We did not have six kids.

  We have seven.

  Lucy, Stephi, Elijah, Zack, Brandon, Savannah, and Ellie Martindale Rivera. We have adopted all of them. Elijah and Zack are brothers. Brandon and Savannah are sister and brother. Ellie came to us because we saw her photo in the newspaper as a child who was available for adoption and we loved that kid on sight. They’re all within three years of age of each other and are very close.

  They come from troubled backgrounds, all of them. I will not pretend that our lives are full of sweet pink blossoms all the time, or that raising kids is easy, especially with what our kids have had to deal with in their jagged pasts. But Jace and I, we love ’em, and they love each other. The horses have helped for therapy, our three dogs and four cats have helped, too. Fishing helps. Cooking with me in the kitchen and working with Jace on the ranch helps, too, as do the wide-open, blue and green spaces of Montana, the buttercups that lie like a golden blanket, and the magical sunsets seen from the top of the hill.

  My mother has decided it is her life’s mission to dedicate seven new doctors to the world, so all of the kids happily spend time at the clinic, study anatomy and biology, and watch medical videos of operations, etc. The videos do not give them nightmares.

  Family comes to us in different ways. Some people are born as family to one another and some choose to become family. I love my Martindale family, and I love the family that Jace and I, and our kids, have become.

  We are the Martindale Riveras. We have seven kids. We are loud and like to laugh. We ride horses and swim in the lake. We eat pies and pizza. We are not perfect and the house is often a wreck, but we love each other, we do.

  And the cowboy still makes my heart race.

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  NO PLACE I’D RATHER BE

  Cathy Lamb

  ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  The suggested questions are included to enhance your group’s reading of Cathy Lamb’s No Place I’d Rather Be.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. Who was your favorite character and why? Were there any characters whom you didn’t like? Was there any part of Olivia’s journey, or another character’s journey, that you could relate to?

  2. Olivia said, “I had a moment of blackness. I did not want to come back to my hometown and work in a dive. I didn’t want to come back here after my mother and grandma told everyone I was a chef in a ‘fancy-pancy’ place in Portland and start flipping burgers. I didn’t want to work for Larry, whom no one liked, in his grease-filled slop of a kitchen and have people I’ve known since I was a baby see me in the back of this squalid, virus-laden hole. I didn’t want Jace to see me here most of all. Not Jace . . . My shoulders sunk. I was broke, but my pride was gone in favor of two little girls with blond curls and beautiful smiles whom I loved and adored. Buck up, Olivia, I told myself. You are making me ill with your pity party. No whining. No complaining, you pathetic, wretched creature. Get to work.” Can you relate to Olivia’s humiliation? Has anything like this happened to you?

  3. Chloe said, on Olivia’s cooking show, “And to the men out there. I’m single. Yeah. I am. I know, hard to believe, but my husband died eight years ago, and if you like a woman who knows how to love and who will hug you in a way that makes you feel all tight and wrapped up, warm and snuggly, that’s me . . . If you want a woman the size of a stick, who resembles a skeleton with skin, don’t call. I am not that woman. Also, you gotta be okay with all of this.” She tapped her temples. “Smart. Tough. I will beat you in shooting matches and arm wrestling and karate. You got an ego that can’t handle that”—she picked up a knife and stabbed it into the cutting board—“don’t you bother calling me. I’m not here to pander to your little whing whang and your tiny balls and your pride on overdrive.” What did you think of Chloe? Would you be friends with her?

  4. Olivia said, “When my mother read us fairy tales when Chloe and I were little girls, she always changed the endings. Instead of Snow White running off with the prince after a single kiss from her glass coffin in the woods, my mother said, ‘When Snow White woke up, she saw the prince leaning over her. She smiled at him. He smiled back. She thought he seemed like a friendly, intelligent young man. He helped her up and they visited with the talking animals for a while because they both loved animals. They went horseback riding together into the mountains, which is what you see in this picture here. He was in college studying biology, and she was studying chemistry. They both wanted to become surgeons. They had a lot to talk about because they both loved medicine and nature. They became true friends . . .’ ” What did you think of Dr. Mary Beth Martindale? Would you like to have her as your doctor? What did you think of how she changed the
fairy tales? How do you feel about fairy tales and reading them to children, especially to girls?

  5. This book took the reader from Odessa in the Russian Empire, to Germany, to London, to Montana, across a hundred-plus years, to tell the stories of Olivia’s ancestors. Did you like the historical background in the book and the structure in which the ancestors’ stories were told? Have you studied your family’s ancestral history? What did you find out?

  6. “Gisela left her faith behind, too. She had seen too much suffering. She doubted there was a God at all. And, if there was, He had chosen not to intervene. He had chosen not to stop the killing. But what kind of God refuses to intervene in a Holocaust? Why had He let the Jews suffer? Why hadn’t He helped other innocent people in a world war that killed tens of millions? She couldn’t follow a God like that. And yet she believed in an afterlife. She believed in heaven. She knew it didn’t make sense. So maybe, somewhere in her soul, she still believed in God. Maybe.” Can you relate to Gisela’s religious struggle? At the end, did she believe in God?

  7. Did you have empathy for Devlin, Stephi and Lucy’s mother? Did you think she should get her children back or have them for visitation? Was it right for Olivia to become, legally and forever, their mother? Do you agree or disagree that parental rights should rarely be revoked?

  8. Was there a scene(s) that made you laugh? Was there a scene that made you cry?

  9. Is this book fiction? Historical fiction? Women’s fiction? Romance? Literary? Why?

  10. Would you rather live in the log cabin, the blue farmhouse, or in Jace’s new house? Why?