“Who’s Christina?”
“A friend of mine. She’s a Christian author and speaker. Travels around the country talking about things like this.”
“Maybe you should talk to her about it.”
“Maybe I will,” Emma said.
“Okay, let me ask you a question,” Colin said.
“All right,” she said, carrying a handful of wildflowers back to the house to put in the kitchen window as a gift for her dad.
“Aren’t you the least bit curious why I’ve called you so many times this week?”
~ Fourteen ~
You’ve already proved it to me time and time again
Baby you’re one good friend.
—GEORGE CANYON
“One Good Friend”
At two o’clock that Sunday afternoon, Emma parked Old Red against the curb in front of the Connors’ quaint Juneberry home. She noticed the ornate Victorian porch, recognized Samantha’s touch in how it was decorated behind the waist-high wooden handrail. Corn stalks, straw bales, a small kitschy scarecrow, assorted pumpkins and gourds greeted visitors and gave them a friendly welcome.
Emma climbed five porch steps, walking up to the open door feeling like a kid trick-or-treating. She knocked, but just as she gave the door her first tap, Jim was getting up from the recliner.
“Am I the first?” she asked.
“No, no, there’s a couple already back there,” Jim said, opening the glass door and escorting her through the Connors’ homey family kitchen.
Samantha greeted her at the patio door, all smiles. She wore not a trace of anxiety, which impressed Emma. The thought of running around to set up a tea party after spending all morning at church was daunting to her.
“Samantha, this looks beautiful,” she said, standing on a step at the back patio doorway.
The enclosed patio ran almost the full length of the house. It was kind of a hidden treasure, a screened-in sanctuary overlooking Samantha’s backyard garden. Latticework capped the farthest porch wall, providing privacy and some separation between houses. Samantha had decorated the space in white wicker, including rocking chairs and a love seat, a bookcase filled with plants along the house wall, and baskets containing large green ferns hanging from the ceiling.
She’d warmed up the room with pink decorator pillows and a beautiful ruby red carpet.
“Hi, Emma.” Samantha welcomed her with a hug.
“I’m so glad you could make it. Let me introduce you to everybody. You know Beth; she’s a little taller than the last time you saw her.”
Beth said hi with a wave, somehow managing to pull off looking grown up enough to be invited and too cool to be there all at the same time.
“And I’d like you to meet Janette Kerr,” Samantha said, gesturing toward the smiling older woman sitting in one of the wicker rocking chairs. “Janette has become such a good friend through our ladies Bible study at church.”
“How do you do?” Janette said, in a voice sounding both gracious and sociable. Her face looked familiar. The blonde-haired woman with a gentle hello and unhurried manners radiated peace. Emma wondered but didn’t think she’d ever seen one of Janette’s movies.
“Fine, thank you. It’s a pleasure meeting you. I understand you’re an actress?”
“Oh, ho, that was a long time ago.”
Emma sensed she was neither proud nor ashamed of her Hollywood career, weary perhaps of having the same conversations about it. Emma took her answer as a hint and sat down with her at the table.
“Sure is a pretty dress you’re wearing,” Emma told her.
“Thank you. I wore it to church this morning.”
“We’re still waiting on Christina,” Samantha said. “But I’m just so glad that you’re all here today. I wanted to throw a welcome-back party for Emma since we love her and haven’t had a chance to see her in a while. Now that the weather’s cooler and the bugs are gone, I thought we could all get together and just have some snacks and girl talk.”
From the other room, they heard Christina’s voice.
“Looks like we’re all here!” Samantha said.
After hugs and hellos and compliments on the patio’s decor, everyone was seated for tea.
“As you can see, we have a couple different kinds of hot teas, fruit tea, unsweetened tea, and just plain old water to drink.”
Beth rolled the teacart into the center of the patio. The centerpiece of the impressive display was a ceramic teakettle—white with blue and purple wildflowers, surrounded by matching cups, creamer, and sugar bowl. The cart was stocked with everything from milk to cream, honey, and cakes.
“At first, I thought about asking everyone to bring a dish to pass, but then I thought maybe Beth and I could just bake a few things.”
“A few things?” Christina laughed, and the others joined in. The table looked decked out for Thanksgiving, with pumpkin pie, chocolate frosted brownies, sliced turkey and bread for sandwiches, and banana bread.
“Samantha, Martha Stewart would blush in embarrassment if she were here,” Christina said. “This table looks incredible.”
“Yes, Samantha, you’ve completely outdone yourself,” Emma said.
“I’m just so glad to be invited,” Janette said.
Samantha smiled and joined everyone at the table and Beth began serving the tea.
“Beth, we hope you’ll feel at home with us,” Emma said, watching as the teenager served the hot tea with practiced poise.
“I feel like I’m with the Juneberry all-stars,” she said. “You ladies have done it all.”
“I’m not sure how to take that,” Samantha joked.
“I’m taking it in the best sense,” Christina said.
“I’ll bet you all have some great stories.” Beth poured another cup of hot tea and offered it to Emma.
“Stories we’ve got!” Christina said. “I’m not sure we’re going to tell them, but …”
The four ladies laughed, and Samantha coaxed the seated women to help themselves to the food.
“Oh, come on. Mom says you and Emma went to high school together and used to hang out at her house all the time. What kind of teenagers were you? Did you ever get into any trouble?” Beth asked.
“We were actually pretty good girls,” Christina said. “Your mom made sure of that. Emma was on the track team, and I was in student council.”
Beth poured a cup of tea for her mother after serving everyone else, then poured herself half a cup. “What about boys?” she asked.
“We dated some in high school,” Christina said. “Mark Barnes—do you remember Mark?” she asked Emma. “Mark asked me to the junior prom, and I dated a foreign exchange student from Ecuador my senior year.”
“Ricardo!” Samantha and Emma belted out, laughing at the memory.
“He was nice,” Christina said. “Okay, a little weird, but nice.”
“What about you, Emma? You must have had lots of boyfriends.”
“Not really,” she said, pouring cream into her tea and stirring it. “I was more of a tomboy in high school. I dated some, but it was on and off.”
“You dated Michael in high school,” Samantha reminded her. “Everyone thought you two made a nice-looking couple.”
“We were never that serious,” Emma said. “We went to a couple of dances, and he asked me to go to a game and watch him play baseball that spring. But really we were all just part a big social group. Somehow, we managed to escape the entanglements of awkward teenage romances.”
“Speak for yourself,” Samantha said. “I married my high school sweetheart, although to be honest, our relationship was never that awkward. My parents liked Jim right off the bat, and I got along with his mother so well that by the time June came around after graduation, we were already talking seriou
sly about a wedding that upcoming fall—and no Beth, don’t even think about it.”
“You and Michael were never serious?” Christina asked. “You got along so well that summer during college, I would have expected that was sparked by a trace of something from when you dated before.”
“Hmm, you’re really asking me to go way back, aren’t you,” Emma said. “He’d asked me to dance with him my sophomore year, that was the first … no, he’d helped me open my locker—oh this is funny, I’d forgotten. He helped me open my locker my freshman year. Remember how hard it was to open those old lockers with the combinations—turn right, turn left. I could not get mine to open, and then this arm reached over my shoulder and whacked the door by the handle and it popped open. Turned out it was just stuck.”
“How did you two get back together that summer before law school?” Samantha asked.
“It was sweet, really. I had taken my dad’s truck to Dudley’s car wash on top of the hill—is it still there? I don’t remember seeing it. Anyway, my dad offered it to me for the summer and I wanted to wash off the farm dust and vacuum the inside. I think I’d graduated from BU only a few days earlier. It was May, warm and sunny, I was so happy to be done with school for a little while.
“Michael and his friend Terry drove up to wash his Blazer and we just started talking. He was already working in construction at the time. Michael and I just started hanging out all the time. We loved to go out to the lake and look at the stars. He’d bring me flowers, listen to me tell all my dreams, and I wrote him letters …”
Emma drifted back in time on a wave of memories, as buoyant as a raft on a summer lake. She wondered when she started signing those letters, “I love you.”
“I don’t think there was a day that entire summer that we didn’t spend at least some time together. He was on my mind all the time.”
Her eyes bore through the glass-top wicker table as she spoke. A single finger rocked back and forth across the edge of her teacup. The other women listened in silence.
“Every week our love grew deeper and wider. By the Fourth of July, I knew I was over my head in love with him. We thought we were perfect together, and I never doubted it, not once.”
Emma stopped. Her testimony, and then her silence, only deepening the mystery. Around the table, the ladies’ collective curiosity built into a crescendo.
“You can’t stop there. What happened?!” asked Christina.
Emma ran her small delicate hand over her blue and white cloth napkin next to her plate, feeling the coarse fibers, tracing its patterns. Christina was right, she’d gone too far into the story to stop telling it now. She owed it to them. She took one last look over the figurative rocky cliff—the interruption in her story—then made the decision to dive into the deep blue lake.
“At my dad’s house, we’re remodeling an old room, the guest bedroom downstairs. Michael suggested we could gain some extra square footage if we knocked out the closet. It was being used for storage, so first we had to empty out all the boxes. We moved them into the living room along with all the bedroom furniture and other debris from the renovation.
“Friday afternoon, while my dad was upstairs resting, I went through the boxes for the first time.” She looked around the table. The other women were spellbound, motionless at the table.
“He’d stored all my mother’s things in them, some of it trivial, things I guess he didn’t want to throw away. Old birthday cards, photographs, love letters, their high school yearbook. I found two photo albums, one from their wedding. The other had pictures of their first house, in Juneberry I guess. On another page there was a faded photo from when they purchased the farm. There was snow on the ground and the biggest smile on my mother’s face. She was all red lipstick and peg-leg slacks. On the last pages, there were pictures of my parents bringing their newborn baby home from the hospital. It was so long ago, the three willow trees weren’t even planted in the front yard yet. There were a few photos of me as a little girl, then the pictures stop.”
Emma’s story stopped too, paused while she allowed her thoughts to pool again.
“I spent my childhood looking for my mother and never finding her, wanting something I couldn’t have. Someone to watch over me,” Emma said, in a whisper like it was a joke, but one that brought pain instead of laughter. “We lived in a house filled with obscure, hazy memories, and an almost indescribable heaviness because someone was missing. There was an empty place in my heart, and I’m sure in my dad’s, too. One day she was there, and the next …”
“I guess I was about twelve when I came to terms with it all, accepted the fact that my mom wasn’t coming back. I just decided the best thing to do was to put it all behind me, ’cause I couldn’t handle it. Does that sound weird? I took those things of hers that I had—a small, framed picture I kept by my bed, a ring handed down to me that I used to play dress up with, a bronze key chain from Clemson, stuff you’d give a kid,” Emma said, and sniffled.
“I put all those things in my jewelry box, and loaded the box in a canvas bag. I rode my bike out to Close Point at the lake, to where it’s swampy and remote. I took a gardening spade with me, and I began to dig in the mud and clay. I must have dug for half an hour, and when the hole was big enough, I dropped the canvas bag with the jewelry box into it, and buried it up in the mud.”
“My gosh, do you think it’s still buried there?” asked Samantha.
“That was the year I moved to town, right?” Christina said.
“Yes,” Emma said. “And for the rest of junior high and high school, things went pretty well.
“One day when I was in the library, during study hall, I found a shelf with college catalogs. When I saw one from Boston University, I just connected with it. I remember standing there between the bookshelves thumbing through its pages. Later, I asked the guidance counselor, Mrs. Garrish, if she thought Boston was too far away for me to go to college, and I remember she told me, ‘No, it’s just up the coast.’”
“It’s like, what, eight hundred miles?” Christina said.
“I needed a break. I needed to get away, and put it all behind me. I found I could do that the farther I got away.”
“And Michael?”
“That summer with Michael … It was the first time I’d been back in the house for a whole season. Sometimes, when Michael and I would go out to the lake, I’d remember what I’d buried in the mud there as a little girl.
“I’d go home at night to a dark house and feel her presence, the memories, and I’d try to push them away again until morning. As the summer wore on, that got harder and harder to do. I loved Michael, but I also felt trapped here … not because of Michael, but because of painful memories, things I never talked about to anyone. And the draw of Boston became so strong because it made them go away, mostly anyway. I had built a good life there. And a future, too. In the end, that was what I put all my trust in—the future I was pursuing in law. I knew leaving came with a price. I guess … I just didn’t know how costly it would be.”
“What did Michael say when you told him you were leaving?” Christina asked.
“We talked about my future a lot and how it would affect us. You know, he said all the right things. But when it came down to the last few days before I was scheduled to depart, I just decided to book an earlier flight to save us both the pain of a long good-bye.”
Samantha raised her eyebrows.
“I know, not the way I would choose to do it today, but I thought it was like pulling off a Band-Aid. Then I got busy at law school, and Christmas came and went and the next summer I took an internship rather than come back to Juneberry. We can fast-forward through the rest, but basically I graduated, passed the bar, and was hired at Adler & McCormick and continued my fourteen-hour workdays,” Emma said, looking at Samantha. “The next thing I knew, I was answering your phone call about my dad. Nearly
a decade had flown by.”
“So you never really said good-bye to Michael?” Christina asked.
Emma nodded. “Sadly, that’s true.”
“I remember my mom coming home from the funeral and crying in her bedroom,” Samantha said. “Hannah was her favorite sister and she always took care of her. I can remember her saying to me, ‘Who’s gonna love that little girl now? Who’s gonna take care of that little girl?’”
“I wanted to escape the memories of my mom,” Emma replied. “I didn’t think of it as running away, though, because I really was running to something. A good something. But … yeah … the more I think about it, the more I realize that’s what I did.”
“Emma, I’m sorry you felt so alone. I feel like if only we’d have known somehow,” Samantha said. “We were all so close. We could have done more.”
“I don’t know, Samantha. I couldn’t talk with anyone about it. Even Michael, who was so good to me.”
“Christina, help me out here, but, Emma, I think you’re missing an important part of the story,” Samantha said. All of their teacups were empty, but no one moved to refill them.
“I so know where you’re going with this,” Christina said, creaking back in her white wicker chair, pleased that it all made sense to her now.
“I think it’s the most obvious part of your story. It may be the part that’s eluded you for all these years: Emma, Michael Evans is the one. He’s your soul mate,” she said.
“Absolutely.”
“Even I can see that,” said Beth.
Samantha noticed the empty cups. “Honey, can you go heat more water for more tea?”
“But this is the best part!” Beth protested, but Samantha motioned her inside with her eyes.
“Emma, people can do the craziest things, make the most horrible decisions at the worst times, and they can not act when the timing is critical,” Christina said. “This is the first time I’ve really heard what really happened between you and Michael. I think Samantha might have seen it—”
“Yeah, I did.”
“—but I didn’t realize the scope of it all, not until I heard you tell it. Now I’m wondering, Emma, if you see it.”
A Beautiful Fall Page 15
