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.If I wait by your car in the parking lot, you get Gail to drive you home.If I call, you hang up.Come on, girl.You know you can’t stay away from me forever.I’ll be here, arms open, when you change your mind.Love, Henry.Jeanie had found the letter in Henry’s Jeep, hidden beneath the coils of the seat.It was lacking a stamp was all, or it would have been ready to mail.It was addressed to Evie Cooper, at 25 Avalon Court.It had the proper zip code, sitting like a small afterthought below the words Bixley, Maine.It was everything a letter needed in order to be official.Surely, Henry being a mailman, finding a stamp was not the problem.Maybe it was his pride that had kept him from sending it.Or maybe he planned to mail it on the very day he died.Jeanie’s grief counseling class had suggested she write a letter to Henry, a way to tell him how she felt about losing him, a way to come to terms with the anger she was feeling.But Jeanie hadn’t been able to do it.It seemed silly, considering Henry had been a mailman and Jeanie didn’t know the zip code for heaven.Or whatever the place is where people who die end up going.Jeanie heard the first pelts of strong rain hitting the bedroom window, and then Chad rising from his bed upstairs, his footfalls heading down the hallway to the bathroom.Lisa’s feet used to tread that same hall.It seemed to Jeanie now that you could measure out a family’s time together in footfalls, and gallons of water rushing through pipes, tubes of toothpaste, or the moments a refrigerator door opened and closed.The door on a house, too, opening and closing as the kids got older and graduated and then disappeared into the world.Those tiny signs that most people ignore as they live out their days together—maybe they were omens—were nothing but markers.They were ways of keeping time, if you had a mind to do so.But Jeanie knew most people didn’t.Thunder boomed now in the distance.In no time, there would be lightning.Jeanie smiled.If this were an omen from Henry, he meant it as a joke, for he was terrified of thunderstorms.How many years had it been since she loved Henry back? Quite a few years.It’s a shame when love turns on itself, destroys itself at the roots.But that’s what had happened.Jeanie now wondered if she could save Lisa and Patrick from this same fate.Was there advice she might give them so that they could sidestep the omens? But she knew that was impossible.Besides, Jeanie McPherson herself had done nothing wrong but fall in love with Henry Munroe.If she had fallen out of love with him over the years, it was because so many other women he met were standing in her way.Now that she couldn’t vent the anger she felt at Henry, maybe it was time to let him go.Besides, in a few days, she would be a grandmother.Evie put a glass of orange juice, two buttered slices of toast, and the bottle of Tylenol onto her painted wooden tray and then carried it upstairs.She figured a light breakfast was better on the stomach, considering the stressful circumstances.Gail was already awake and sitting up in bed.She was staring at the pictures that hung in walnut frames on the bedroom walls.Evie put the tray down on the end of the bed.“How’d you sleep?” she asked, and Gail shrugged her shoulders.“How I always sleep,” she said.“As if the wolf is not just at my door, but in bed beside me.”“I hope he’s good in bed,” Evie said, and smiled.Now Gail had to smile, too.Funny how mornings could change a lot of bad things, give them a new spin.For folks like Margie Jenkins, mornings probably didn’t change anything at all.But for other people, just a bit of time passing means the wound is starting to heal.Evie had read once that the last stage of healing for an actual wound is called remodeling, when the initial scar tissue reconstructs itself.She always thought that sounded like what people do with their lives, too.Thunder clapped ominously and the rain came fast, striking the tin roof of the house with metallic fists.Evie went over and shut the window.Then she locked it.“Who are they?” Gail asked.She was staring again at the portraits.They were the proper and dignified kind of photographs, taken in those days when people sat once or twice for a photographer.It was their own statement to the world, proof that they’d once existed, that they had been there on the planet for a time.People did this for the day when they would be gone, so that someone who cared might remember them.But now, with cameras hanging out all over houses, with digital images being rushed through cyberspace, people were getting sick of looking at each other’s faces.“That woman was my mother,” said Evie, nodding at the portrait.Helen Cooper was wearing a black tulle cocktail dress.She looked quite regal, and Evie liked to think that her mother was regal, once, back in those days when she and her husband went dancing.Back when there was reason to wear a cocktail dress.And what’s more, Helen was smiling such a lovely smile.It was a better version of her than the real one Evie had known, the woman who hid from the light, who dissolved in a dark room of grief and sorrow until she disappeared altogether.“She was very pretty,” said Gail.“You look just like her.” Evie was told this often, that she looked like her mother, the woman in the lovely black dress, a classic string of white pearls around her neck, posing for some photographer whose name was still printed on the back of the picture.The Richard Penwick Studio, Philadelphia, PA.In truth, Evie’s mother now looked more like a younger sister.She had died in 1968, the year she turned forty-two and Evie turned sixteen.This was the same year her mother brought Rosemary Ann’s portrait down from the attic, dusted it off with a wet cloth, and presented it to Evie as a special gift.Evie was now eight years older than her mother would ever be.“And that’s my father,” said Evie, now pointing at the sweet-faced man in the proper, dark gray suit, his hands folded on his lap, the sadness of his life still to happen.“And that’s my sister, who died before I was born [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]