Love on a Train by Colleen L. Donnelly

Author:Colleen L. Donnelly [Donnelly, Colleen L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Published: 2015-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

I began to write again. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t stop it now that this part of me had been unearthed—by David’s mother, even if she didn’t know. I wasn’t writing on paper, as Mama most feared. I was writing in my mind and my heart, capturing stories that were springing up, encouraging characters who emerged from deep within, so deep I thought they no longer existed.

Each face watching me open my gifts, in the arc around my shower table, erupted into a character. No matter that I knew them, had interacted with these women throughout my whole life. As I smiled and thanked each one, their stories rolled out on their faces. I saw them. I read them, and I felt mine rise up and join them. Women whose hearts secreted different lives than they were experiencing chatted and flattered me while sitting primly on their seats, their compliments promising me fiction—promising me a lie. The sort of lie no one dared to reveal. Except an author.

“I’m exhausted.” I sank back in my chair after the last gift had been opened, the giver thanked, and smiles exchanged. I watched as ladies stood and headed toward the refreshment table. There were still plates of dark blue cookies and plenty of rose-colored punch left over to satisfy them, not to mention the number of snacks Karen had lured my mother away to arrange earlier. “My face hurts from smiling so much,” I whispered to Karen as I rubbed my cheeks. Gifts for my new home with David were stacked in front of and around me, the wrapping paper neatly folded on the floor nearby.

“Keeps the divorce rate low,” Karen whispered back, bundling all the cards together. “No one wants to go through this twice.”

I didn’t have a character for Karen. She was honest and real to the core, no crafty surprises behind tinsel smiles. Only honest surprises, ones that amazed her also, like learning to drive. Mama said being too real was why Karen wasn’t married yet. Karen was too clear, too direct, and men didn’t like that.

I didn’t have a character for Mama, either. Or for David’s mother. They were icons instead of people, standard setters for brides-to-be as they fitted young women into scripts where every page was already written. And the same.

I pried myself out of my chair to help Karen gather the gifts. We stacked them at the far end of the table, ready to be driven to David’s house as soon as the crowd thinned. Each shiny new appliance I touched, each soft colored linen, each glass dish or metal pan felt like hope in my hands. The promise I was going to be a real bride. Soon. Someone who knew her role and how to act it without being told.

“Well, that went well,” Mama said from behind me. Karen and I both stopped. We glanced at each other and then at Mama. We knew she didn’t mean the accumulation of fine items lined up and ready to go.

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