Weekend on Sullivan's Island by Ashley Farley

Author:Ashley Farley [Farley, Ashley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AHF Publishing
Published: 2023-08-07T18:30:00+00:00

nineteen

brooke

Brooke spotted Sawyer everywhere. Through the window of the coffee shop on her walk to work. On a run down by the seawall. Across the produce department at Harris Teeter. She assumed her mind was playing tricks on her, but short of reaching out to her ex, she had no way of knowing if Sawyer had actually left town.

Brooke was going through the last of the items in the attic before work on Tuesday morning when she stumbled upon an old wooden trunk tucked away in a far corner. She lifted the lid, but it wouldn’t budge. There were no latches, only a single keyhole. Curious, Brooke went downstairs for a screwdriver, and when she returned to the attic, the trunk’s lid stood open. Lying on top of folded clothes was a worn leather diary. Scrawled across the inside cover in her mother’s neat cursive was the inscription: To my darling girls, Brooke and Lizbet. Always follow your heart.

She thumbed through the yellowed crinkly pages. The diary appeared to chronicle the events of her parents’ courtship and subsequent marriage. She’d often wondered why her parents never spoke of how they’d met.

Brooke had thought a lot about the word partner in recent days. She’d even looked up the definition in her mom’s ancient edition of Webster’s dictionary. One of a pair of people engaged in the same activity. In the case of a marriage, the same activity of sharing a life.

Her parents’ traditional marriage—her father the breadwinner and her mother a stay-at-home mom—had always bothered Brooke. She’d never understood how her mother had been content to keep house and raise children. Had she never longed for anything more? Lula took her job seriously. Her garden had been without weeds, her house immaculate, and her husband and children well fed and healthy. Brooke wasn’t judging her mother. Lula had been perfectly happy in her role of caregiver. But Brooke wanted something more for herself.

Women were obviously equipped to give birth, but men were just as capable of nurturing the babies afterward. Brooke felt both spouses should have careers. She believed that finding fulfillment outside a marriage was the key to a successful relationship. Maybe this concept had initially attracted her to other women. She wanted someone like herself to share her life. But she no longer thought of herself as gay. Her feelings for Grady changed everything. Was it possible she wasn’t gay after all, that she’d convinced herself she was homosexual to satisfy a deep-seated need to . . . To what? Be different? To shock her mother?

Brooke wondered how Grady felt about marriage. Was he an equal-partner type of guy? Or did he want a stay-at-home wife to have dinner on the table every night at seven o’clock sharp? They’d resumed their friendship as though they’d never been apart. But there was still much she didn’t know about the grown-up Grady.

From a distant part of the house, Brooke heard someone knocking on the front door, followed by her sister’s faint voice calling for her.

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