Why the Sky Is Blue by Susan Meissner

Author:Susan Meissner [Meissner, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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I met Michael the first day we moved to Blue Prairie. He was fifteen and incredibly tall and handsome. I fell for him right then and there, even though I was only twelve and a half. My dad’s new partner at the veterinary clinic, Wes Gerrity, and his wife, Nicole, who would be my mom’s business partner several years before she was my motherin-law, came with a pan of lasagna the day we moved in. They also brought Michael and Andrew, their sons. Andrew was ten, and though Spencer was three years younger, they found plenty to do together, leaving Michael to me whenever our parents got together, which was often.

I don’t know when he fell in love with me. I am sure it was not the day we moved in. But by the time he graduated from high school three years later, we had secretly betrothed ourselves to each other.

The day he left for South Dakota to go to college, my mom sat down with me and told me that a lot could happen while Michael was away at college, that it might be wise if I dated other people. I was only a sophomore; I had my best high school years ahead of me, she said. And Michael would be facing new situations of his own.

I knew she meant well, but I was mad at her for weeks after that. She was suggesting Michael would want to date other girls. Unthinkable!

As it turned out, Michael did date other girls. That spring, in his second semester of college, he broke up with me, telling me we needed time to make sure we were meant to be together. That summer when he came home to work for our fathers at the vet clinic, he told me he had made a mistake, that I was the only one for him. Would I take him back?

I made him wait a week before I told him “yes.”

That was the end of my dream of big city life, matching hats and gloves, and a pianist husband. When I graduated in 1992, I went to college in South Dakota too, only because Michael was there and it was his senior year. I took a year’s worth of generals, and then we got married. He came back to Blue Prairie to teach ag at the high school. And I came back with him, of course.

By then, my mom and Nicole had this great little business going. Their little shop started out as an idea for a small used book store that my mom wanted to open. She wanted to call it Tennyson’s Table. She has always been crazy about Tennyson. She bought this little nineteenth-century writing table at an estate sale once, and a box of old books came with it. By the time she came home with her purchases, she already had this idea in her mind.

The table wasn’t really Tennyson’s but it looked like it could have been. It was old enough to have been his, was English, and was definitely a writing table.

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