“Your husband died?” Brenda interrupts me, her face suddenly pained. “How terrible! He must have been awfully young.”
“Just twenty-nine,” I say. “It was an accident. So now it’s just me and my little girl.”
All three of us are quiet for a moment. Ellie’s eyes are shut as though she’s not quite in the room with us. The silence feels weird. Sort of charged. I hear the sliding of van doors outside. The voices of the construction workers. I think it’s time for me to leave.
I open my mouth to say goodbye, but Brenda breaks the silence first. “I lost my husband young, too,” she says quietly.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I feel an instant kinship to her. There’s grief in her eyes, even after all these years. “How old was he?”
“Only twenty-two. We were getting the nursery ready for the baby I was expecting. He was repairing the ceiling and lost his balance. Fell off the ladder.”
“Oh,” I say, a hand to my throat. I’m startled by the coincidence. “My husband was working in our new house, too. He was climbing the stairs—the house was only half built then—and he didn’t notice a pile of screws on one of the top steps. The railing wasn’t up yet. He fell off and broke his neck.”
Brenda nods as if my story makes sense to her. “Garner didn’t die right away like that,” she says. “I lost him in the emergency room.”
Ellie suddenly opens her eyes. “I’ll never understand why you called Uncle Byron for help instead of an ambulance,” she says.
“You don’t think rationally at a time like that, Ellie.” Brenda speaks quietly, but I see the muscles in her throat contract. She looks at me and I nod. I know what she means. You become a different person in a moment of panic, if only for a few seconds.
“Did you ever remarry?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Garner was the love of my life,” she says. “And I…” She licks her lips. “The stress was too much. I lost the baby I was carrying. So, I’ve been alone since. All my adult life. No husband. No children.”
I feel sympathy for her, but I know I won’t let her future be mine. I still have Rainie. And I’ll meet someone, someday. It’s hard to imagine falling in love with anyone but Jackson, but I’m hopeful that it will happen.
“I can’t believe you moved into the house where your husband died,” Brenda says. “I could never do that.”
Her words hurt, they’re so abrupt. “Well, we designed it together so it’s very special to me,” I said. “There’s so much of Jackson … my husband … in it. We were living with my dad for a while, but once the house was finished, I—”
“You should go back to your father’s,” Brenda says. “Take it from me, sweetie. You need that support. You may not realize it now, but if I were you, I’d sell that pretty new house and let Reed take care of you. It’d be good for both of you.”
“I’m not leaving,” I say, with more strength in the words than I feel. “And anyhow, my father’s moving into a condo, so I no longer have that option.” I think of my father’s letter to Jackson, warning us about the location, and the crazy lady in my office who said the trees would suck the breath out of us, and Ellie telling me to take the tree house down. It seems like nobody thinks I should live in Shadow Ridge.
“Well, enough of this,” Ellie says. She gets to her feet and crosses the room to shut the windows. She sounds bored, as though she thinks her friend should have moved on long ago. I think she’s tired of Brenda’s story. Maybe she’s heard it one too many times over the decades in letters and phone calls and thinks that Brenda has wallowed long enough in her grief. There’s something between these two women besides friendship, I think. Something old and prickly.
Right now, though, I feel responsible for bringing the conversation down. “I need to run.” I touch Ellie’s arm. “I’ll let myself out,” I say. “This was wonderful.”
“We’ll do it again,” Ellie offers, surprising me. Despite how well our session went, I still don’t get the feeling that she likes me all that much.
“I’d love that,” I say. I head to the door, but Brenda speaks up again.
“My Garner was your father’s best friend,” she says.
I turn to her. “Your husband?”
She nods. “They were best friends. We used to double-date all the time. Ellie and Reed, Garner and me.”