Hope Out Loud by Kristina Riggle

Author:Kristina Riggle [Riggle, Kristina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC044000 FICTION / Contemporary Women; FIC045000 FICTION / Family Life; FIC027020 FICTION / Romance / Contemporary
Publisher: NLA Digital LLC
Published: 2015-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Anna

Friday, July 5, 2013

We’ve picked up Mom’s dress, freshly cleaned and pressed, and hung it on the back of a door in the sewing room. It had been Cami’s bedroom as a girl, and she painted it sunny yellow in that last vicious summer living with her father.

Even behind the plastic of the garment bag, the dress is lovely.

“Lunch?” Mom asks brightly.

“No. Not lunch. A talk, instead.”

I sit down on a futon against the far wall, facing her Bernina sewing machine, one of the last relics from her life with my dad. It had been a gift from him, both perfect and horribly wrong because they couldn’t afford it.

“Have you talked to Al about how you feel about the house?”

My mom slumps against the back of the futon. “Yes.”

“Oh, good. And?”

“And nothing’s changed. He can’t move in here. He just absolutely feels he can’t, and in fact he was upset that I didn’t say something earlier. He wonders what else I haven’t been telling him.”

A thread of a crack runs through her voice and she tugs at a curl.

“So what are you going to do?”

She looks around the room, and I know in her mind’s eye, she’s seeing the rest of the house, as lovingly restored first by Cami and then by herself as tenant.

“I’ll probably marry him.”

“Probably? I hope that’s not what you said to him.”

“No, goodness. I told him I would get used to the new house. And he promised I could take my time moving in, and he’d help me move as many plants from my garden as would survive the transfer.”

“So where does ‘probably’ come in?”

My mother angles toward me on the futon, but her eye is on the sapphire engagement ring she turns around and around on her finger. “I’m worried that part of me is just getting married because he asked, because I didn’t want to be a burden to you, and don’t you dare object, Anna Geneva. A single, aging mother hundreds of miles away from where you live is a burden even if my blood pressure is good and it isn’t always.

“And here we come down to it. Leaving this house and moving in with him and suddenly I’m his wife? I haven’t been a wife, not really, in so many years. I’m not sure I know how to do it anymore. I never knew! With Robert, I felt most of the time like his nagging older sister, or heaven help me, even his mother. Always telling him he was in the wrong.”

“He always was in the wrong.”

“Being right was cold comfort, especially when he left me, left us. Alone.”

“Al won’t be like that.”

“I know he won’t, but I feel how I feel. Is it normal to be this terrified?”

“I wouldn’t know firsthand, but look, you’re not a naïve little ingénue who thinks that marriage is a lifetime of sunset walks on the beach. Of course you’ve got worries. But Al is not Robert Geneva, and thank God for that. ”

I

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