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Anna’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding!”
“Come on, Anna. This is one of the biggest milestones in our lives. I figured we could eat our weight in the local food, go hiking, and make friends with the locals. Maybe we can even pretend we live here.”
Anna’s heart opened with happiness. “Dean! Thank you.” She threw her arms around him, as she knew it wasn’t an easy thing to get time off from the school he worked at.
“Who knows where we’ll end up, Anna,” Dean said wistfully. “Maybe we’ll want to raise our children somewhere like this. Or maybe, just maybe, we’ll end up back on Nantucket with your family.”
Anna sighed and placed her ear against his chest to hear its sturdy beat. He wrapped his arms around her, comfort against the chaos of the rest of the world. They were twenty-three and twenty-five with so much of their lives in front of them. It was remarkable to know that the rest of their lives had begun right there, in a very tiny room on Orcas Island.
ChapterThree
Eloise Richards Clemmens lived alone on the Clemmens Farm on the outskirts of Muncie, Indiana. She’d lived there alone for three years since the death of her husband, Liam, who’d grown up on the farm and, after they’d met in the seventies, brought her there to live with him. Eloise had prayed for a beautiful future together, that they would have children, raise them on the farm, and live an honest yet happy life. Unfortunately, children had never come, and happiness had come in fits and starts.
It was a beautiful afternoon in April, in the upper sixties, and Eloise stood in a pair of overalls and gazed across the flat fields that surrounded the farmhouse and the barn. Sunlight sparkled against the dead weeds, which cut out from the soft spring earth. Since Liam’s death, she hadn’t had the energy to keep the farm going, and she’d hired other farmers to handle the land themselves, taking most of the profit along with them. But Eloise made more than enough to get by.
Then again, Eloise was only sixty-five years old. It was possible she’d be at the Clemmens Farm all alone for the next twenty years. The thought chilled her to the bone.
Eloise walked back into the farmhouse to make herself a cup of tea and read the newspaper. In it, journalists wrote at-length about the rainy season, the soybean crops, and the local basketball and baseball teams. Eloise had been an Indiana resident since the seventies, but a part of her had always felt separate from all of it, as though she was reading a book but didn’t quite understand the language it was written in.
“You’re a Hoosier, through and through!” Liam had told her many times over the years, especially on their happier days together. “I can’t remember Indiana before you were in it.”
But it wasn’t true. Eloise still had dreams about her youth, when she’d been a girl on Nantucket Island— a gorgeous, sun-dappled place lined with white, sandy beaches and filled with rolling green hills and beautiful daffodils. She hadn’t been there since she was sixteen years old, but when she used the computer in the study, she googled images of the place and realized, with a lurch in her stomach, that her memories of Nantucket weren’t that far off. It really was heaven on earth.
The fact that she’d had to leave the island continued to shatter her heart, no matter how often she told herself it didn’t matter. “It is what it is,” is what she’d previously said about it. Unfortunately, even so many years after the fact, her departure was still the single-most horrific event of her life.
As the sun began to drop in the late-afternoon sky and fill the house with orange light, Eloise grabbed her spring jacket and walked out to Liam’s truck, which she’d enjoyed using since his death. High up in the driver’s seat, she was able to pretend she had a level of power that she really didn’t. She’d sold her car two years ago for a measly three thousand dollars to some high school kid who’d been very pleased with his newfound freedom. Her friends had thought she was nuts. “Who wants to drive such a big truck?” they’d asked.
Eloise drove the truck into Muncie, where she shopped at Kroger, filling her cart with enough food for the rest of the week— yogurt, cereal, fruits, vegetables, and even a kind of pasta made with chickpeas, which interested her. Since Liam’s death, Eloise had hardly eaten any of the things she’d previously cooked for him, like steak and pork chops. It was strange, she thought now, the little things that changed when your partner in life left you behind. She’d lost a bit of weight, yes— but she’d lost some strength, too.
Eloise’s friend, Brenda, texted just before she headed out of town.
BRENDA: Eloise! It’s been such a long time since we last spoke. Would you like to come over for coffee and catch up?
Eloise wrote back immediately, pleased to have been thought of. She hated to admit how lonely she was and very rarely reached out to the friends she and Liam once had together.
ELOISE: I’m in town. I could come by now.
Brenda sent back an “okay,” and Eloise started the engine in the truck and headed over to Brenda’s house off of Main Street. Traffic had escalated, and Eloise cursed herself for shopping so late. Muncie wasn’t an average town in Indiana. It was home to Ball State University, and it seemed to triple in size at certain hours of the day as professors and students swarmed from the campus.
Brenda was out on the front porch when Eloise drove up in the truck. She raised a hand and smiled gently as Eloise stepped out of the truck and walked toward her. “Look at those overalls,” Brenda beamed.
“I’m a farm girl,” Eloise joked as she hugged Brenda close, surprised at how easy it seemed to hug her after so many weeks without human touch.
In the house, Brenda prepared a pot of coffee and sliced pieces of lemon cake, upon which she’d drizzled a light frosting.
“Mike likes there to be something sweet when he comes home,” Brenda explained.
“I remember those days,” Eloise offered, thinking of when Liam had come in from a hard day in the fields. “Liam used to bark and rage with hunger. Once he was fed, he fell asleep like a lost puppy on the couch.”
Brenda frowned. “You must miss him so much.”
Eloise wasn’t sure what to say to that, so she lifted her mug of coffee and sipped. To get the subject off of her and her lonely life, she asked Brenda questions about her grandchildren, and Brenda brightened up immediately. A part of Eloise burned dully with jealousy, but only a part. She’d always imagined herself to have children and grandchildren, but she’d never imagined she’d end up so alone. Those were the cards she’d been dealt.
“You know, Eloise, the girls and I have been talking about you,” Brenda said, interrupting Eloise’s reverie. “And we think you should sell that farm out there and buy a place in town. We play cards every Wednesday, and you could join us at church on Sundays.”
Eloise’s stomach tightened at the thought. On the one hand, she’d considered it herself— abandoning that farm on the outskirts and becoming a new and improved version of Eloise here in town. On the other hand, the idea of abandoning Liam’s farm after his death made her feel very sad. Liam had wanted to keep the farm in his family so badly that he’d asked her to move back to Indiana with him. When the children hadn’t come, Liam’s eyes had grown increasingly hollow, so much so that sometimes, when Liam seemed to be looking at Eloise, he wasn’t looking at anything at all.
“I’ll think about it,” Eloise told her.
