The Restoration of Celia Fairchild - Marie Bostwick Page 0,130
that conference in Williamsburg with Heath because she’d feel guilty having a good time while you’re so miserable. Pris and Happy are bickering again. And I haven’t slept in days because I’ve been lying awake, trying to figure out how to tell you to quit feeling so damned sorry for yourself!
“The plan was to do it diplomatically. But obviously that didn’t work out,” Polly said, sounding almost as frustrated with herself as she was with me. She got to her feet and started to pace across the room. “Look, Celia. I know this is hard and a huge disappointment. But you’ve got to get up and go on with your life! You can’t hide up here forever, acting like somebody died.”
“You don’t understand,” I said, and turned my face to the wall, not from despair but from bitterness and anger. Polly had never even wanted a child; she’d told me so herself. So how could she possibly understand what I was feeling? To have everything I’d ever longed for, to have held her in my arms, believing she was mine, to have loved her and then lost her— No, Polly didn’t understand. No one could. “It’s like she did die.”
“No. It’s not.”
Polly stopped pacing. The adamant tone in her voice drew my attention, and I turned toward her again, expecting to see an angry face, hear angry words, and prepared to answer with some of my own. But instead of anger I saw desperation, heard the pleading voice of a frightened friend, and felt the edge of my own anger soften.
“Don’t you see, Celia? Because you wrote that letter and helped Becca to be strong and stand up to her parents, Peaches is very much alive and very much loved. Because of you, Peaches didn’t die.” She paused, looking at me with sadness and sympathy. “But your dream did. And I know what that feels like.”
She was talking about having to close the shop, of course. She was trying to help, I knew that, but it wasn’t the same. Peaches wasn’t a dream, she was the dream, my chance for happiness.
“And Sheepish was mine,” Polly said, after I finished speaking. “I put everything I had into it—all my money, all my hopes and dreams. I’ll never forget how I felt the first time I unlocked the door and turned the open sign face out. For the first time, I felt like I doing something important with my life, sharing what I loved most with the world, spreading a little joy. I know it was only a little shop, a small dream. But it was mine,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, her eyes glassy with memory. “When it failed, I felt like I’d failed too, blown the only chance I had at getting the only thing I wanted.
“But you’re the one who told me I couldn’t give up,” she said, refocusing her gaze and sounding less sympathetic than she had a moment before. “You’re the reason I’m putting myself out there again. You’re the reason I took a dead-end job that’ll be easy to quit if Trey does manage to get me that zoning variance.
“‘Try again,’ Polly said, shifting her voice into a nasally twang that was meant to imitate mine. “‘You’ve got nothing to lose by taking a second chance.’ Nothing but getting my hopes and heart broken again,” Polly said, tossing me a glare and planting a fist on her hip. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but why are the rules different for you than the rest of us?”
“They’re not,” I insisted. “But this is different, don’t you see?” Of course she did. The fact that she was pretending like she didn’t was starting to tick me off. “You can always open another craft shop. But I’m not going to get another baby.”
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, come on, Polly! Because I do, okay?” I scooted toward the headboard, putting as much distance between us as possible, and hugged a pillow to my chest to keep from throwing it at her.
“Do you have any idea how many ‘Dear Birth Mother’ letters I sent out the first time?” I asked before answering my own question. “Sixty-seven. Do you know how many birth mothers responded? One. Becca. And that was only because she found out that I was Dear Calpurnia. Well, I’m not Dear Calpurnia anymore. Now I’m just me, just Celia Fairchild, a single woman with a big house, no job, and no prospects. There won’t be