Page 2 of Through the Dark Night
Now that she was older, the cold got to her more, the wind felt chillier. Her coats and winter clothing didn’t keep the chill out like they used to. Maybe she would hate winter. Maybe this was a big mistake. Maybe she should have gone to Florida.
She kept puttering along. There was the church on the hill. The old one that had closed before she had left and before the new one closer to the lake had opened. That’s where the grave was. The one she hadn’t visited in almost twenty years. What kind of mother was she to have not visited her daughter’s grave in all that time?
She felt guilt clogging up her throat, but she pushed it down. Forcefully. After all, she had taken the absolute very best care of her daughter while she had been alive. She had been the very best mother that she could possibly be. Who cared whether she took care of the grave after her death?
Suddenly she had an urgent need to see it. But she was already past the place where she needed to pull off, and she kept going.
There, at the end of the dead-end street, she could see the healing garden that had taken the place of the old gazebo that had sat there all through her childhood. It had started to decay and fall, and the town had demolished it before her children had been old enough to hang out there like she and her friends had.
They had had so much fun sitting in the gazebo, talking, making plans, using it as a meeting point for a trip to the pebble beach.
So many memories, and yet the gazebo was long gone.
She turned her head and saw Fran’s store.
Almost without thinking, her hands turned the wheel, and she pulled in along the street, parking right in front of the store that didn’t seem to have changed at all since the day Shannon had left. She had stopped here and bought a soda and a bag of chips for both of her children. They had been a good bit younger than Yolanda at eight and ten, and she hadn’t wanted to have a whole lot of questions, she hadn’t wanted to have to talk to them. So, she convinced her husband to stop,and she’d run in and gotten them what amounted to bribes to stay quiet for the trip to Detroit.
James hadn’t wanted to stop, not when they were just getting started, but she insisted.
She couldn’t even think about James, so she put those memories aside to think about later too. It seemed like that was what she did with everything her whole life, set it aside until she was able to handle it. When would she be able? Here she was, fifty years old, and still didn’t feel like she was adult enough to face all the pain and heartbreak in her past.
But she definitely couldn’t think about that now. Not if she was going to go into Fran’s, which apparently she was since she had parked the car right in front of the store.
Part of her wanted to go in, to see what had changed, and part of her wanted to run in the other direction.
Deliberately putting her hand on the latch and yanking hard, she opened her door and stepped out, adjusting her purse over her shoulder and squinting in the bright sunlight. She adjusted her shades and closed the door, walking with determined steps to Holloway’s General Store.
The bell jangled over her head as she opened the door and stepped in. It wasn’t hard to recognize Fran, who was adjusting some candy on a shelf right in front of the checkout counter. Her hair was white, and there were definitely added pounds, which gave her figure a more matronly look than what Shannon remembered, but Fran wasn’t the only one who had a more matronly look.
She didn’t look like she was in her twenties anymore either. Although, she had been thirty-four when they left. With three children, she’d been slender, maybe not teenage slender, but she definitely didn’t have the matronly figure that many mothers of three did. Not then anyway. She’d gained weight since the divorce, although she lost it before it had been finalized. Sleepless nights, wishing she could have done something to keep her family together, wondering what she could have done to prevent her husband’s infidelity, and constantly trying to tell herself that she had done the best she could, and there was no point in looking back.
Fran straightened and turned around. She blinked and then tilted her head as Shannon removed her sunglasses.
Shannon didn’t really expect Fran to remember her. It had been almost twenty years.
“Shannon McKay, well, I’ll be… I guess it’s not McKay anymore, is it?”
“Actually, it is McKay.” That had been the first thing she’d done after her divorce was final. If James didn’t want her anymore, she wasn’t going to keep his name. Her kids had been a little upset with her. They hadn’t wanted to have a name that was different than hers, but they hadn’t wanted to ditch their father’s name either, and she had not encouraged that. She had gently suggested that the name that they were born with was the name that they identified with. She encouraged them to not do anything rash. After all, James had been a good father. If by good, one ignored the fact that he had cheated on his wife and broken up his family, committing adultery and leaving a wake of pain and devastation behind him.
Fran’s face fell, and her brows lowered. “Oh? I hadn’t heard.”
The gossip hadn’t reached Raspberry Ridge? Shannon supposed that made sense. After all, she didn’t have any ties left in Raspberry Ridge. Both of her parents had passed on in the last five years, and her siblings had long since fled. She stayed in touch with them but not on a daily basis. It was more like she picked up the phone for Thanksgiving or Christmas or maybe texted them on their birthday. And they did the same for her.
She nodded.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Fran said, sounding truly sorry as she bustled forward, her arms outstretched. And if her walk was a little bit less steady than it used to be, if she seemed a little bit more frail, Shannon ignored it as she allowed the older woman to wrap her arms around her and envelop her in a cinnamon-scented hug.
It felt like home.
Without thought, she felt herself hugging back, tightly, the kind of hug a person gave someone they knew and loved and missed.
“I’m sorry I mentioned it,” Fran said, stepping back and looking up at Shannon, almost as though she was hungry for a good look at her.
“It was amicable.” She didn’t feel like she was lying when she said that. Her husband and she were still talking. She could call him up today, he would answer her call, and they would have a civil conversation. However, she knew there was a part of her that resented what he did, that was hurt in a way words couldn’t explain over the fact that he had walked out on their almost thirty-year marriage. That he had obviously not even tried to make things right between them. He hadn’t suggested counseling, hadn’t even told her that there was anything wrong. She just intercepted a text his girlfriend had sent, and he’d come clean about everything and moved out that same day.
“Well, that’s good to hear. So many times, there’s so much fighting and bickering that the lawyers get everything and a person has to be careful about what they say.” Fran waved her hand. “But Raspberry Ridge seems to be the place for second chances lately. You wouldn’t believe the people who have come back and found love here. It’s…been good for my old heart to watch.”
“That’s not going to happen to me. But I am back to stay.”
