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“Yes. And I always like company on a drive,” Eloise explained quickly, the words coming to her at will. “If you want, you can come with me.”
Anna waved both hands in front of her. “No, no. I couldn’t do that. I don’t want to be a burden.”
“You wouldn’t be a burden,” Eloise explained. She then searched through her purse to remove her driver’s license and several other IDs, along with a photograph she kept of herself and Liam during happier days. “Maybe it’s better if I explain who I am so that we’re not strangers anymore.” Eloise managed a small smile, which Anna tried to reciprocate, but seemed unable to. “My name is Eloise. I was married once to a very kind man named Liam, but he passed away a few years ago, and my farm was recently burned to the ground, so I feel a little aimless right now. I have friends out east, and I’ve been planning to visit them for years. Now that my farm is gone, it’s the right time.”
Anna lifted the photograph of Liam and Eloise, and her eyes glittered, as though she recognized the power of their union. Eloise wasn’t sure their love had been so, so strong, but it had lasted, and that was something.
Anna lifted her eyes to Eloise’s, her lower lip quivering. “If you really don’t mind.”
“It would be the greatest blessing I can think of,” Eloise assured her. “Please. Come along.”
Anna dropped her head against the booth cushion and closed her eyes. This close-up, she looked every bit a Richards rather than a Copperfield, although Eloise wasn’t sure Anna even knew the last name “Richards.”
“Do you mind if I go back to the funeral home first?” Anna whispered, barely loud enough for Eloise to hear her. “I’ll regret it forever if I don’t go.”
Eloise squeezed Anna’s shoulder. “You take all the time you need, honey. We’ll head east when you’re ready.”
ChapterSix
Anna hated Dean’s funeral. She sat in the front row with his parents and his siblings and stared at the floor, listening to a minister who hadn’t truly known Dean at all talk about his wonderful personality, his love of baseball, and his achievements in teaching, as though one person could only be made up of a few traits and that was that. But over the past year, Anna had spent real time getting to know the complexities of Dean Carpenter. She’d learned how sensitive he was, how passionate he was about teaching, about how much he hated cinnamon— and about how little he respected his father, who’d cheated on his mother back in 2001 and eventually wormed his way back in.
This was the family Anna had thought she was joining. Now, they looked at her sullenly, as though Anna was a reminder of the life Dean had left them for. If only he hadn’t moved to Seattle in the first place. Dean wouldn’t have been so reckless in Ohio. Perhaps he would have settled down with his high school sweetheart and lived to be ninety-one.
Regarding the high school sweetheart, Anna met her, too. Her name was Chelsea, and she was sweet, doe-eyed and could not stop crying about how much she’d loved Dean, even though he’d broken up with her when he’d moved to Seattle. “I used to hate Seattle,” she wept to Anna. “I couldn’t even look at it on a map.” Beside her, Chelsea’s husband stood with a curious expression on his face, as though he wasn’t sure where to look. For a few seconds, Anna and the husband regarded one another as if they both realized they wanted to be anywhere else but there.
“I have to go,” Anna told Dean’s high school sweetheart. “Take care of yourself. Okay?” Then, she turned on her heel, walked to Dean’s mother, and told her the plan. She said it as though it was the most natural thing in the world— that she had to leave Ohio and that she had to do it immediately. Dean’s mother was too distraught to do anything but say, “Yes. You’re not family. You don’t have to stay for the wake.”
Eloise drove a ridiculous truck. When Anna opened the passenger door, she looked up at the seat as though it was the highest branch on a tree. With a huff, she hurled herself into the truck as Eloise laughed gently. She looked at Anna with a lot of generosity and compassion, but without pity, which Anna appreciated.
It was the first time she’d ever hitchhiked. Anna prayed her instincts about Eloise were right.
“How did it go in there?” Eloise asked. She’d changed into a pair of overalls, and she’d removed all of her makeup. It looked as though she’d settled into herself.
Anna groaned. “It was terrible. The minister had no idea what to say about Dean. It felt like he just made stuff up.”
“Gosh, I just hate that.” Eloise started the engine, and the truck purred around them. “I felt the same way at my husband’s funeral. It felt like a formality that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with showing the people in Muncie, Indiana, that we were good and proper people, the kind of people who did funerals correctly.”
“That sounds really hard,” Anna whispered.
Eloise flashed Anna a sorrowful look. “Where did you say we can pick up your stuff?”
“It’s just five minutes away,” Anna explained. “The back door’s unlocked, so I can just run in and grab my bag.”
Eloise drove out to Dean’s family’s home, then hovered in the driveway as Anna hurried into the backyard and then through the glass door. Dean’s family dog barked at her as she entered, and she took a moment to slide her hand over the soft fur around his ears. Dean had loved his family’s dog and shown her a picture of him on their second date.
What would Anna do with all this information about Dean’s life now? Where would she store it? Was her brain big enough to keep everything?Right now, she was pretty sure she would never move on from this— that Dean would be the only man she ever loved and that she would maintain that love any way she could. But another part of her hoped that one day, the pain of this would be over. She felt guilty about that.
Eloise drove them eastward from Dayton until nine o’clock that night. Then, she parked outside a Holiday Inn and said, “I’m not very good at driving at night. Do you mind if we sleep here?”
Anna did not mind, of course. She was exhausted, and although she really liked Eloise, she wanted a few hours alone to decompress. In the hotel room, she called her mother, who answered on the first ring, as though she’d been staring at her phone all day, hungry for information.
“Anna,” her mother breathed.
“Mom.” Anna’s face crumpled at the sound of Julia’s voice.
“How did it go?”
Anna rolled across her bed and stared at the hotel ceiling. “It was really hard,” she answered honestly.
