“I did get a piece of good advice. A friend encouraged me to start focusing on what I have rather than what I lost. I’m finding that very helpful. I think in a year or so I’ll be very happy. When I’m done being so pissed I could bludgeon him.”
“I’ll be happy to wipe your fingerprints off the club,” Addie said, smiling.
Then they melted into laughter.
* * *
It was nearly ten by the time Justine and her daughters left, their sides aching from laughter. Adele, Jake and Justine had told stories from the days before the girls were born, back when their parents were friends and played cards every week. They told of neighbors like Mr. Swank who fed stray cats and when he passed away it was discovered he had over forty living in his house. And Mrs. Hall who spent twenty-five years as a crossing guard and no one knew she had never been hired by the school district. There was the librarian who had a years-long hot romance with a studly lifeguard, and the pair of brothers who ran a local farm who it turned out were never brothers at all. Jake had a hundred funny stories related to running the neighborhood market.
Adele promised to leave a key under the flowerpot in case her nieces wanted to drive down from San Jose to go to the beach, since school was out and both girls had part-time summer jobs. Olivia was babysitting and Amber was working at the food court in the local mall.
When they said goodbye, they all hugged as though they’d just wrapped up a holiday dinner.
“I’ll call you,” Justine promised Adele.
“And I’ll call you. We’ll have to do this again.”
Then they were gone, and Adele and Jake stood on the front porch, waving goodbye until the car was out of sight.
“I guess I’ll shove off,” Jake said. He draped an arm across her shoulders. “This was a nice surprise, Addie. Thanks.”
“I guess you should thank Justine. I need to see more of my sister. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had that much fun with her. I should find a way to put a few pounds on her without putting pounds on myself.”
“I’m going to tell you what I told Justine—you look great, but you were always beautiful. You just never seemed to know it.”
“I think I did it to myself,” she said. “I became a shut-in. I called myself a caregiver and I did help. I did take care of my mother the last few years. But I had a broken heart and I was hiding away.”
He gave her shoulders a light massage. “There was a lot you didn’t tell me.”
“Do you want to come in for a while?” she asked him.
“Sure, but you don’t have to tell me.”
“Thanks. Let’s see what comes naturally.”
“Can you handle it if I have a bowl of ice cream?”
“Sure. Of course.”
So they went inside. Jake had ice cream and Adele talked. She told him about some of the problems she had come to know in her new job, no names or descriptions, of course. She explained how she was starting to relate to them. She’d shut herself away for years because it was easier than facing the world and risking her poor heart again. Even though Jake knew all about her pregnancy and the stillborn baby, they had never talked beyond the surface of it.
“I guess I was traumatized,” Adele said. “Well, my dad’s injury was bad. He was in and out of the hospital so many times, having surgeries on his back, stuck in a wheelchair, and here I was, my belly growing bigger by the day. I hardly even cared that he was angry with me for getting pregnant and having no husband. I made a nursery for the baby, did you know that?”
“I’ve never been upstairs,” Jake said. “My mother was the one who told me the baby didn’t live.”
Jake had sent flowers at the time. Adele hadn’t had a proper funeral for her baby. She had her mother, father and sister and they