Sunset on Moonlight Beach - Sheila Roberts Page 0,8

the door. She refused to let it in. She’d had a good life for many years. There was no reason to think it was going to turn bad. This was simply a crossroads.

“What are you going to do?” her coworker Angie asked her the next day as they sat in the employees’ lounge, eating their lunch. Angie was dieting again, determined to lose forty pounds. She was eating yogurt but eyeing Mel’s ham and provolone sandwich jealously.

“I’m not sure,” Mel confessed.

“By the end of May we’ll be out of jobs,” Angie said bitterly.

“Yes, but maybe something even better is waiting. Every storm brings a rainbow.”

“You still have to get through the storm,” Angie argued.

Money management had never been Angie’s forte, and she and her husband lived from paycheck to paycheck. It could prove hard for her to find that rainbow.

“I’ve applied at Haggen, IGA and Safeway,” she said. “None of them are hiring. Now—” she shook her head “—Brit and Doug were smart. They saw the writing on the wall and got out while the getting was good. She’s starting as a checker at IGA next week, and he got on at Safeway.” She dug into her yogurt. “This sucks.”

“At least Carl’s still working,” Mel pointed out.

“We can’t live on his paycheck alone.”

Maybe they couldn’t, not with the way Angie spent money. To be fair, she had three teenagers to provide for. It was more expensive raising a family than it had been back when Mel was raising her girls. Still, Angie’s family would have an income, which was more than Mel could say. And they had each other.

It had been hard raising children without her husband. The grandparents had been a godsend after Mel was widowed, but so many times she’d wished John was with her, both to see the girls’ progress and to help her make decisions. All she’d had of him were memories. Memories couldn’t fix leaky sinks or change the oil in the car. Memories couldn’t pay the bills.

But memories could remind you that you’d lived more in a few short years with your wonderful man than many women lived in a lifetime with theirs. Memories couldn’t warm your cold feet at night but they could warm your heart.

Mel had managed. She’d manage now, too. So would Angie.

“Things will work out,” Mel assured her.

She said as much to herself when she got home. She had some money saved. She’d be fine.

Her neighborhood book club met later that week at her house to discuss the first work of fiction by Muriel Sterling, a nonfiction author they all liked. The story was about a group of women helping each other through difficult circumstances, titled The Way Home. Mel had rooted for the characters as they fought through health issues, divorce and a scandal or two.

She was sure her next-door neighbor, Amanda, who’d been divorced twice, would sneer at the neatly wrapped happy ending, and Ellen, who lived on her other side, a connoisseur of novels, would find it trite. But Roberta, Caroline and Holly, like her, would be happy to see things work out for the characters. Real life was already hard. It was satisfying when the pretend version ended well.

“What are you going to do now?” Amanda asked Mel when the discussion was done and the conversation turned back to what was going on in their lives.

“I wish I knew,” Mel said, and helped herself to more cheese and crackers.

“I think it’s a shame the store is closing,” said Roberta. “And it’s so sad to be losing your job after all these years.”

“Yes, but you’ve been there forever. I think, like Birdie in the book, it’s time for you to have a new adventure,” Holly chimed in. She was the youngest member of the group, a redhead with a husband who loved to travel. Birdie had been her favorite character.

“I don’t see any adventure that glamorous in my future,” Mel said. “Birdie got to go to Paris.”

“Everyone should go to Paris,” said Roberta. She was their oldest member. Her husband had been in the navy and she’d been all over the world.

“Or Moonlight Harbor,” said Ellen. “Maybe it’s time to move. Of course, you know we’d hate to see you leave.”

“But we’d come visit you,” Roberta added.

People often said that, but time had a way of swooping in and erasing old friendships. It had happened to Mel when she married and moved away from her home in the city. She’d seen it happening with Jenna, who was