“Yeah, yeah, but then, I came here to findthis! This is my husband’s hairy back, and this is the woman who works at his office, I think. New receptionist. Nice, huh?” Hope didn’t normally share her life story with strangers. But technically, this wasn’t a stranger, and her life story didn’t normally take this kind of turn.
“Oh, Hope, I’m so sorry! That’s terrible.”
Hope hadn’t seen this woman for decades, but somehow, she felt so unhinged that she was spilling details of the intimate disaster that was her marriage.
“I mean, Archie and I had problems. From the get-go, we had problems, but we were a team. We were working to pay off the house, we were almost there, and to sell it, and to maybe someday I could—”
She stopped herself. This was a stranger. It had been decades. She and Libby had exchanged their deepest secrets, hopes, dreams, and Forenza Sweaters, but that was long before they were adults. This pulled-together woman didn’t look like she would understand a thing about Hope’s dreams these days or disappointments.
“Look, I’m here at the exact right time. Not the wrong time.”
“Yeah, me unraveling in my hotel room in Vegas.” Hope sat down on the bed; she felt her spine slump over. The joy, the sense of accomplishment she’d just felt, were crushed, pulverized by the hammer of her actual life.
“I am here with an offer, something I think you’d be perfect for.”
“What?” Hope had no idea what Libby did for a living, where she lived, or what kind of offer she’d be in a position to make.
“I was very recently in a similar situation to you.”
“Oh yeah, your husband too dumb to know what a shared iCloud is?”
“Ha, no, too addicted to gambling to see that siphoning money from the non-profit I founded could land him and me in prison.”
That stopped Hope in her self-pitying tracks. Of course, she didn’t know Libby’s troubles or anything about her life. It was hard to see someone else when your vision was clouded with your own unfolding drama. She felt like a heel.
“Oh, Libby, I’m so sorry. You married Henry Malcolm, right? That was the last I heard from my mom.” Hope remembered how she heard it too. Her mother had hung it out as an example of someone doing things “the right way” versus how Hope and Archie had been forced to marry quickly before the first semester was even underway in her freshman year of college.
Ugh. What a mess that was, second only to the current one.
“I did, and it was okay for a decade or two…until it wasn’t. Anyway, I moved back to Irish Hills. I’m working to revitalize the town.”
“Wow, I miss the lake. I never got back after that summer in 1989.” An image of her grandpa’s farm stand, and her grandmother’s little kitchen, flashed in her mind. The smell of her beach towel drying on the line. It all came back in a rush. Hope wondered if the central nervous system was supposed to know how to process all this information from different points of her life careening around her brain at the same time.
She was feeling decidedly nauseous. So maybe the answer to that question was no.
“Same, but let me tell you, returning to Irish Hills was just what I needed. Oh, and J.J. is still in town.”
J.J. Libby, Goldie, and Viv, her Sandbar Sisters. She had thought of them often, wondered, when she had a moment, where life had taken them.
A swirling dark cloud separated her youth in Irish Hills from her adulthood. She then blurted out a fact she barely let herself unpack. Her life didn’t have room for it.
“Well, I mean, we did maybe nearly kill a guy. I have great memories, but then, the tornado.” That day nearly destroyed Irish Hills. They’d protected themselves from the elements for sure and protected J.J. from her mother’s abusive boyfriend. When she framed it that way, it was okay. She could live with herself. But if she really looked at it, did they contribute to a man being swept away in the storm because they wouldn’t let him into the cellar at Nora House?
Libby took Hope’s hands in hers. She smiled softly. She was one of five women on the planet that this likely haunted in the same way.
“Oh, we didn’t kill anyone. It’s a long story. But we didn’t. That guy, Bruce? Yeah, Aunt Emma basically drove him out of town. Not us. Not the tornado. But I get it. I stayed away, in part, because of that.”
Hope returned the smile, and then it felt like her legs might not support her much longer. She needed to sit down. She needed to let her body catch up to all the input her brain was getting. The cooking victory, the marriage failure, and now the relief that they actually didn’t hurt anyone back in their teen years. It was a lot.
Libby seemed to understand and guided her to the chair in the corner of her hotel room.
“I’m going to get you a glass of water,” Libby said.
“Yes, okay, thank you.”
Libby busied herself with that, and Hope tried to unspool all the threads knotting her up.
Hope didn’t often take out memories and turn them over, examine them, or try to understand how they brought her to where she was. She didn’t have time for that. It didn’t serve her to look back.
