Page 2 of Below the Far Horizon
And she had been blissfully unaware.
What a farce her marriage had been. The one saving grace was the fact that her husband had adamantly refused her request to consider having children. She had begged and pleaded, wanting to start a family, buoyed by memories of her own family growing up beside the shores of Lake Michigan. They had been happy, idyllic days. Days she wanted to recapture, and maybe she thought the best way to do that would be to have a family of her own.
Still, her husband had adamantly refused. And Grace had ended up being happy about that, after all of the details of his exploits had come out.
Maybe not all of them. She actually didn’t know if she knew all of them or not. Maybe there were things he had done behind her back that she had never found out about. That was quite possible. He wasn’t exactly known as an honest person or someone who ever told the truth. Ever.
She almost snorted. Her ex was the kind of person who didn’t tell the truth if a lie would suffice.
The clean lake breeze lifted her hair. That part of her life was over now. She tried to push it out of her mind and focus on the conversation she would be having when she stepped in the door.
Deciding a combination of knocking and walking in would be the best move, she rapped on the door before she opened it and stepped inside.
She had prepared herself for seeing her mother and the questions that her family would invariably ask. The confrontation of her sisters over the fact that she was broke, jobless, husbandless, and driving a BMW that may or may not be repossessed in the near future. All of those things she expected, and felt she deserved, to be grilled on.
What she hadn’t expected was the way the scent of her mother’s home, familiar and beloved and bringing back all of the happy and wishful memories of her youth, would hit her.
She was still reeling from the slightly yeasty smell, mixed with flowers and her mother’s hand cream, when Stacy, her older sister, appeared in the doorway of the living room.
“I thought you were coming yesterday,” Stacy said, in lieu of a greeting apparently.
Grace reminded herself that she needed to be humble. She’d been proud for way too long.
“I’m sorry. I…got held up.” Not by anything in particular. Just by her own cowardice. She didn’t want to leave her home, the home she lived in since she got married ten years prior. Her husband had claimed it had been a gift from his parents. Now she wondered. But what else would it have been? His paramours hadn’t exactly been giving him money. It was the other way around.
Even though it had been a year since she first found out, pain still balled up inside of her. Maybe she was paying for all the lost dreams or for the way that she had been determined to make a success of herself. To show everyone that even though she was a small-town girl, she could play on the big stage.
And maybe it had to do with the fact that she was running from the memories, the tragedy that she never thought about and that she wanted to overcome. To have so much success in her life that she never had to look back and think about what might have been. What she lost, what the people of this town lost.
“Mom is in the den. She prefers that room to this one, as you would know if you had been here at all.”
“That’s the way it was when we were little. I guess I remember.”
Stacy gave her an eye. Maybe at the humility in her tone. Then she lifted her head in acknowledgment, turned around, and started marching toward the den. Grace looked toward the kitchen, the bright cheerfulness still familiar and beckoning her, but she ignored the call. She needed to go see her mom. And Jill, her younger sister. Get those introductions and interrogations out of the way. If all three of them were in the room with her, perhaps she would only have to do this once.
Her mom sat on the couch, a soft blanket over her, wearing a comfy brown top, not jammies, although a worn pair of slippers sat beside the couch. They were not the slippers her mom had worn when she had been a child. Had those worn out? Been lost? Grace hadn’t been around enough to know.
“Grace!” her mother said, looking up and holding her arms out.
Gita Honea was a naturally optimistic, happy person who’d made Grace’s childhood idyllic. She’d been the perfect mother, as far as Grace could tell, even though Grace had gone through a period of rebellion in her teenage years, like every teenager did, right?
That wasn’t true. She’d known teens who had grown closer to their parents during those years. Unfortunately, she didn’t have that kind of wisdom at the time to know that was the best way for a person’s life to go.
Now she did, but now was way too late. She wanted to apologize to her mother for the grief she caused during those years. But this wasn’t the time.
“Did you find out why she wasn’t here yesterday?” Jill asked as she walked into the den behind them.
Stacy shook her head.
“I want a hug first,” Gita said, continuing to hold out her arms.
Grace walked forward, embracing her mother, reveling in the familiar scent of vanilla and yeast and something sweet and dear to her heart.
It was the scent in this house that had turned her heart and stomach inside out.
That’s what was going to make this next conversation more difficult, because the scent had brought back all of the love and laughter, and the tragedy too.
She straightened, her mother making sure to continue to grip her hands.
