Be My Love

by Lucy Kevin

  Now Mandy looked sympathetic. “I’m happy to help if I can. Just give me a minute.”

  She went off into the back room and when she came back, she said, “These are the working ledgers from around that time. They’re like a big diary of the old place.”

  The stack of ledgers was huge and Joel had to admit that, all along, he’d known there was only a limited chance of finding any reference to his Great Aunt Poppy here. And yet, he’d still taken two days off from Peterson Shipping during the busiest season of the year to dash across to Seattle with Hanna.

  It was madness, looked at that way...madness that only worked if he didn’t allow himself to look too hard at it.

  “I think I have something!” Hanna declared after only a few minutes of reading. “Joel, you’ll be able to tell better than I can.”

  Surprised that she could have found anything so quickly, he read through a couple of housekeeping notes on the need for more towels and a request for an afternoon off that didn’t seem like anything special, even though it was signed ‘P.’

  But then, he took a closer look at the handwriting.

  “Do you see how similar her handwriting looks to the poem?”

  Joel could see it easily enough, but he was too shocked to believe it was true.

  The date was 1952. A year after Poppy was supposed to have passed away.

  “Do you know who could have written this note?” Hanna asked Mandy.

  “If I’m remembering what my grandmother told me correctly, that would be one of the chamber maids. Penny, I think she was called when they noted her wages.” Mandy flicked through the book, and sure enough, there was a wage sheet showing half a dozen people, one of them listed simply as Penny P. “Let’s see, she worked here for about a year before leaving.”

  Hanna asked Mandy for more details, but Joel needed some air, so he slipped out of the room and went to stand on the front porch. As much as he wanted to deny it, the handwriting was definitely the same.

  Which meant that his great aunt hadn’t died when everyone thought she had.

  Instead…she’d run off to become a chambermaid in a bed and breakfast in Seattle.

  “Joel?” Hanna stepped out on the porch beside him. “Are you okay? Aren’t you happy that we know for sure now that Poppy didn’t commit suicide?”

  “It means she left, Hanna.” His voice sounded hollow even to his own ears. “It means she abandoned her family.”

  Poppy had abandoned everyone around her. Just left. The way everyone in his family seemed to.

  Joel’s parents and grandparents had died years ago. His aunt, uncle and cousins who lived off the island had disappeared as soon as they were able, leaving him with the company to run, regardless of whether it was what he wanted, and only very rarely visited.

  And now he’d just found out that his family’s most tragic figure had been just as selfish as the rest of them?

  “Even so—” Hanna began, reaching out for him, but Joel stepped away from her.

  He could see the hurt register on her face as he did so, but he hurt too much himself right then to stop himself from pulling away.

  Pulling away completely.

  “This was a mistake. All of it. Allowing you into the archives. Looking into Poppy’s past. Coming here to Seattle to hunt down a house in an old picture.”

  “What about last night? Do you think that was a mistake, too?”

  Joel had wanted to allow the beauty of being with Hanna to override common sense. But now he knew for sure that if Poppy could just leave the way she did, without giving so much as a thought to the people who loved her, then anyone could leave.

  “Yes, it was a mistake. One I tried so hard not to make with you.”

  He knew how much his words had to hurt her, but she didn’t cry. Didn’t run.

  She did the exact opposite in fact, saying, “I know it wasn’t a mistake. Nothing that beautiful could be.”

  Her absolute certainty that they were good together regardless of what anyone thought shook him to his very core. “When you told me you were going to make this documentary,” he reminded her, “you told me flat out that it was so that you could get into the graduate program. And when you do, you’re going to leave.”

  The way everyone left. The way his parents had. The way his aunts and uncles and cousins had.

  The way Poppy had.

  “But I lo—”

  Joel cut Hanna off before she could finish. “And even if you did stay...if you stayed because of me...that would be just as bad, because then I’d be the guy forcing you to give up your dream. It wouldn’t be right. Not for either of us.”

  He knew the right thing to do now. Had known it all along, actually, but had been so tempted by Hanna’s smiles, by her laughter, by her beautiful blue eyes that so captivated him, by her intelligence and passion, that he’d ignored common sense.

  “You should get going if you aren’t going to miss the ferry back to the island, Hanna. I’ll get a ride back on one of the mussel boats.”

  He let himself look at her one last time, let himself remember how good it had been to be with her, before he made sure he was the one walking away this time.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Hanna wasn’t entirely sure how she got home. She could barely remember making her way back through Seattle, the festival still going on all around her. It had seemed so wrong that the rest of the world could still be enjoying itself when Joel had just broken her heart. Shattered it into a million pieces, actually. And she barely remembered the ferry ride, either, wondering the whole time how Joel could walk away from her without a second glance.

  Finally back at the Walker house, she stumbled in through the door. When Charlotte hollered, “Aunt Hanna is back home!” she gave her niece a quick hug before quickly heading upstairs so that Charlotte wouldn’t see the tears she was only just starting to let fall.

  A short while later, Emily opened up her bedroom door, and as she sat beside Hanna, her oldest sister put an arm around her. “We got your message,” Emily said gently. “What happened?”

  “Joel and I…”

  Hanna shook her head. She could easily imagine everything Emily was going to say about her sleeping with Joel. How could she be so stupid, starting something with a Peterson? And, couldn’t she see that he was completely wrong for her?

  But that was the problem. Hanna couldn’t see that. She loved him. She loved him, and he’d walked away as if what they’d shared together had been nothing.

  As if she was nothing.

  “We guessed that part,” Emily said softly, but instead of lecturing her or saying I told you so, Emily simply drew Hanna closer. “I thought being with Joel would make you happy, Hanna.”

  “I was happy. So happy, Emily. Until he walked away.”

  “Then you deserve better than him.”

  But that was just the problem, Hanna thought as she wiped away her tears, there wasn’t better than Joel, and now he was gone. He was gone, and the simple fact of that felt like a black hole opening up inside her, devouring everything else.

  But Hanna knew Emily wouldn’t understand, especially not when all she could see was that Joel Peterson had made her youngest sister cry. A part of her wanted so badly to confide all of her hopes, her fears, her dreams to her sister, but another part just wanted to be alone.

  Eventually when she stayed quiet, Emily left, saying something about going downstairs to fix something for Hanna to eat. Was it lunch or dinner? Hanna wasn’t sure. She didn’t even know how long she’d been there anymore. She wasn’t hungry, in any case.

  A few minutes after Emily left, Rachel came in. Her second eldest sister took her hand. “I know it hurts when a guy just walks out on you,” she said, obviously having already spoken with Emily.

  Hanna could see the pain still there in her sister’s eyes from when Charlotte’s father had walked out on Rachel. Not only did she have to cope on her own as a single mother every day, but she’d also shut herself away from oth
er romantic relationships so that she wouldn’t be hurt again.

  “Joel didn’t just walk out on me, at least not right away. We found out some things about Poppy in Seattle first. Important things.”

  “But after you did, he didn’t want you messing with his family anymore, did he?” Rachel guessed.

  “No, he wasn’t angry with me for pursuing my documentary anymore, not when he’d agreed to join me in the search for information. It was what he found out about Poppy that made him angry. She didn’t end her life after her engagement fell apart; she moved on to a new life in Seattle instead, without telling anyone in her family.” Hanna was still trying to make sense of it all. “He was angry, so angry, when he found out that she’d walked away from her family without a second thought. And then he walked out on me the same way.”

  Rachel squeezed her hand. “I’m pretty sure that if men made sense, the whole world would be a simpler place. But you have us, and we’ll make sure you don’t need to worry about him anymore.”

  It wasn’t that simple though. Hanna couldn’t just put Joel behind her and move on with her life.

  Not when she still loved him.

  And not when she could still remember the pain in Joel’s voice as he’d told her that he couldn’t see her anymore. He’d seemed so certain that she was going to leave him, just like Poppy had left her family behind all those years ago.

  “One day,” Rachel promised, “it will hurt less and everything will pretty much go back to normal.”

  But Hanna didn’t want her old normal. She wanted Joel, wanted the fantasy of a life with him that she could so easily see, and feel deep inside her heart, to be her new normal.

  “Charlotte painted you a picture. Well, it’s more of a handprint, really.”

  “That’s so sweet of her.” Hanna tried to force a smile, but she couldn’t. She also didn’t want her little niece seeing her like this, or to grow up believing that falling in love meant getting hurt. “I’m not sure—”

  “I know. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll let her come up to say hello. Now, I should probably go check on her before she decides to repaint the walls with crayons.”

  A few minutes later, Paige popped her head in the door. “I guess you must be pretty sick of all of us coming to check that you’re okay by now.”

  Hanna shook her head. “No, I would never get sick of any of you.”

  “I got a few details downstairs,” Paige said as she sat down on the bed with her usual grace, “enough to guess that Emily played the big-sister-knowing-best card and Rachel probably told you all men are unpredictable pigs.” Paige hugged her. “Which is why I thought I’d just sit here with you until you felt like kicking me out.”

  Hanna loved each of her sisters, but they’d always related to each other in different ways. Emily had been the one who had told Hanna how to solve her problems, Rachel had once been the slightly wild one who always seemed to have done everything first and had ended up broken from the risks she’d taken, and Paige, while older than Hanna, had never judged anyone’s choices. She’d simply been there to listen, and to talk things through, if Hanna needed to.

  “I slept with Joel in Seattle.”

  Paige kept sitting there, just listening, the way she’d promised she would.

  “Then in the morning, after breakfast, he told me we’d made a mistake by being together. You’re right that Emily and Rachel think he walked away from me because he’s a Peterson, or because it’s what men do.”

  “Why do you think he left?”

  “We found out that Poppy had worked as a chamber maid at the B&B we stayed at. In 1952.”

  “But,” Paige said in clear surprise, “she died in 1951.”

  “No,” Hanna confirmed, “she definitely didn’t. And once we learned that she must have escaped the island, and her family, to live a new life, Joel started talking about how people always walk away...and how I was going to do the very same thing as soon as I’d finished the documentary.”

  Paige didn’t say anything that time. She’d always been good at not saying things.

  “And the truth is,” Hanna said, “I don’t know if I was going to. I mean, the graduate film program is what I’ve been working towards since pretty much forever. But I didn’t know I was going to fall in love with Joel. Why couldn’t he have let me have some time to think? To figure things out? Why did he just have to push me out of his life like that?”

  Paige put both of her arms around Hanna. “We’re all here for you. Whatever you need. You know that, right?”

  Of course, that was right when Hanna’s phone rang. Morgan was calling from New York.

  Paige let herself out as Hanna picked up to speak with her sister, who immediately launched in with, “Emily and Rachel called to tell me about your documentary, and how you need it for your grad program acceptance...and also what happened with Joel walking away from you so that you wouldn’t be able to leave him first. Are you okay?”

  Hanna appreciated, more than she could ever tell her sister, that Morgan hadn’t simply offered to make some calls to the film program on her behalf. “Thank you for calling to check in on me. It’s so nice to hear your voice. But...” She couldn’t lie and say she was okay. Not when she really, really wasn’t just then.

  “You’re amazing, Hanna. Even when we were little kids you always had such vision, and such a knack for telling an engaging story. And you also have one of the biggest, most open and honest hearts of anyone I’ve ever met. I don’t know Joel beyond seeing him at school and around town when we were kids, but I have to believe that way down deep in his heart he must know you would never leave him the way the rest of his family did.” Hanna could hear someone talking to Morgan in the background. “I’m sorry,” her sister said in a low voice, “but I need to go right now or the movie star I’m working with will have a major hissy fit.”

  Hanging up the phone, Hanna thought about what Morgan had said, particularly about Hanna’s honesty.

  She’d given him everything last night, yet the truth was she’d still been shooting for her place in the masters program. What, she had to ask herself, would have happened if she’d gotten it? Would she just have left Joel behind?

  No. For as much as the program meant to her, she couldn’t have just left him like that, and why would she when surely there was a compromise they could figure out so that they could be together while both pursuing their dreams.

  What’s more, Hanna simply couldn’t believe that Poppy had abandoned her family like that either. Not unless Joel’s great aunt hadn’t had any other choice.

  Yet that was what all the evidence seemed to point to, that Poppy had run off to Seattle and let everyone think Ava and William had driven her to suicide, the stigma of it following them around for years.

  There was a soft knock on the door before her grandmother stepped inside. “Hanna, darling.”

  Of course Grams would be there for her when she was upset, the same way she’d been there for Hanna with every scraped knee and tear in her childhood.

  Ava sat down on the bed next to Hanna, holding a small cardboard box. “Your sisters have told me quite a lot of what is going on.” She brushed aside a strand of Hanna’s hair. “Though I’m not quite sure that any of them got the whole story, did they? You do love Joel, don’t you?”

  Hanna nodded without hesitation.

  “I’d like to tell you what I know of Poppy Peterson now, if you still want me to.”

  “I thought you made a promise?”

  “I did. And I’ve kept it so long that it’s almost a part of me now. Everyone involved is dead. Even so, I’ve done my best.”

  “Then why break it now?”

  “Because it was a promise given to spare people pain, yet now you and Joel are both hurting deeply because of it. Poppy wouldn’t have wanted that, Hanna. You’d have liked her if you’d known her. And I know she would have liked you, too.” Ava opened up the box. It was full of old envelopes. “If you’re wondering why you’ve ne
ver seen these before, it’s because I kept these in a special place where curious little girls couldn’t find them,” she said with a small smile. Ava reached into one of the envelopes and pulled out a postcard. “William and I received the first one about a week after Poppy left. It just said ‘I’m okay.’ She didn’t sign her name, but we immediately knew it was from her. She always sent them in envelopes where she typed our names and address on the outside, probably so that no one in the post office would recognize her handwriting on the actual postcards. And we never showed them to anyone else, but we kept them all.”

  “I don’t understand,” Hanna said as Ava passed her the envelopes and she pulled out postcards one after the other. The first ones were all clearly sent from Seattle, but the others were from different places, seemingly all around the country. “What happened back then, Grams?”

  “The first thing you have to understand is that William and Poppy never loved one another. They loved their families, but their families loved their positions on the island as much as they loved their children. Or perhaps I just have harsher memories of that situation than most.”

  It was understandable that she would, given how people had treated her after she and William had married and Poppy had disappeared. Hanna didn’t say that though. She just let her grandmother keep telling the story.

  “Everybody said what a good match William and Poppy were. Even over in the city, where I was a dancer, the news was of how the marriage between the son of the berry magnates and the daughter of the ship owners would join together two powerful businesses. Always the businesses, mind you, and never a word about love. And when I met William, I knew at once that he didn’t love Poppy. Which was just as well, because I loved him from the very start. It turned out that he loved me too, though he was extremely reluctant to hurt Poppy, because he actually thought she might love him. So we did the sensible thing and met with her in Seattle, on the pretense of a shopping trip, to ask her.”