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He hadn’t really minded church as much as he thought he would, but he sure wasn’t going to mention that in front of Kelly. At this rate, she’d probably have him attending potlucks or some widowers’ Bible study by Friday.
He didn’t live here; he was just a visitor. So why were she and Lulu so bent on making him and Carly feel welcome? Was that a valley thing? A wedding thing? Or just a Nelson family thing?
One half of him didn’t want to keep talking to her, but the other half of him was desperate to know how she pulled off the control she seemed to have. The control he couldn’t seem to find. “When’d you get your balance back?” he blurted out after a short pause in conversation. His life felt like a bicycle most days—living a crazy need to keep pedaling so he didn’t tip over.
She gave a quiet laugh. “You’re assuming I had any in the first place.”
“You’ve got more than I can manage at the moment. I don’t know how much more scrambling I’ve got left in me, you know?” He shook his head. “That’s a stupid thing to say.” The gentle recognition he saw in her eyes kept making him blurt things out.
“Oh, no, I get it. Busy feels good—well, better than the alternative, at least. Some days I wonder if there’ll ever be enough of me to make a decent life for Lulu and me. I mean, running the flower shop in a tiny town—even a tiny wedding town—isn’t exactly a surefire plan for solid success. Well-adjusted people don’t lie awake at night wondering how much longer a flower cooler named George will hang on.”
Lie awake at night wondering how many more days. Isn’t that exactly what he’d done on Sandy’s last days? Terrified to fall asleep for fear he’d miss the moment she slipped away from him?
Kelly looked up at the ceiling. “Now who’s saying stupid things? That was insensitive, to say the least.”
“No,” he said. “Kind of feels better to be able to say it. People are always so careful around me. I don’t want to be this fragile. I’m tired of being less than okay, on the verge of okay, anything but okay. Only I don’t know how to get to okay from here.” He looked over to see Carly looking into the kitchen window, waving to him with a happy, floppy mitten. “How to get her to okay. I mean, the whole unicorn thing. Either she isn’t seeing them, and she’s upset, or she is seeing them—which means she’s living in a fantasy instead of reality. That can’t be okay.”
“For her, maybe it is. I still get near hysterical on an airplane.” She sighed. “I don’t think there are rules to this. Not with kids, not with us.” She paused for a moment before saying, “I think maybe one of the reasons Lulu is so taken with Carly is that they’ve both lost someone. Lulu has friends who have single parents from divorce, but Carly is the first person in her age group Lulu knows who’s had a parent die.” She squinted her eyes shut. “I hate that verb, you know. ‘Die.’ ‘Passed’ sounds like it isn’t enough, and ‘die’ sounds like it’s too much.”
Bruce nodded his agreement. He hated most of the words associated with what happened. Deceased. Lost her battle to cancer. Widower. Bereaved. None of the language ever came close to describing the thing anyway.
“Have you had friends do the pushy date thing?” he asked, just to change the subject.
That brought a real, full laugh from her. “Oh, yes. And believe me, there aren’t a lot of eligible bachelors my age in a place like this. Plus—no offense to your gender—having a child in tow doesn’t exactly light up your prospects with most guys.” She looked at him. “You’ll have it easier, though. It may be a gross generalization, but I think women take to blending families easier than men do.”
He couldn’t believe he was asking. “But you’re looking?”
She shook her head. “Not really. I don’t know about you, but what I had with Mark was better than lots of thirty-year marriages I’ve seen. Absolutely too short, but oh, it was terrific. I hit the jackpot on the first time out. Trying again just feels like inviting disappointment.” She pulled in a deep breath. “No, I’d rather spend my time helping other people get married.”
Kelly sounded so content, so in control. She’d made peace with the parts of her life that had been taken away. She had plans and goals, wasn’t lurching though life in survival mode, doing the bare minimum to get by. Was it the constancy of her faith that had done that? His own faith had seemed to evaporate into a thin film of anger for him on the day of Sandy’s funeral. Was she just better suited to this survival journey than he was? Or was it just that time healed like everyone said?
Maybe it really was time. He could almost believe, listening to her, that he could get to where she was one day. Right now, he just needed to get through the upcoming wedding, and maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world if she helped a bit with that.
Chapter Five
Bruce and Carly managed to have a pleasant “vacation” day Monday. Visiting Darren and his elk herd up at the national park, they’d had a whole long, unhurried day out in nature. Darren’s elk had always fascinated Carly; he’d often wondered if they were the source of her imaginary unicorn thing. She’d “seen” one of her unicorns in the forest, playing among the elk herd. Was that good? Or bad? Whatever it was, the sighting had put her in a good mood, which at least meant his plans to spend quality time with Carly might succeed.
Until Tuesday morning anyway. The first words out of his daughter’s mouth were a whiny, “I’m tired of outdoor stuff. I wanna go play with Lulu today.”
Had anyone ever thought about bottling a five-year-old’s bored whine as a deterrent? To anything and everything? He loved Carly, but that girl had a pitch to her whine that could set his teeth on edge. He’d been expecting a request for a repeat visit to Lulu’s, but he’d thought it would at least come after breakfast. Not his daughter’s first waking words. “Good morning to you, too, sunshine,” he said.
“Can I?” She padded over in bright yellow pajamas covered in rainbows.
He put down his newspaper and pulled her up onto his lap. “Lulu has school today, remember? I thought you and I could have fun.”
“Is it gonna snow today? Can we go sledding?”
Bruce turned to the weather page at the back of the paper and pointed to the pictures that showed the week’s forecast. He pointed to the big snowflake on the box marked for Thursday, the one after the box with the big heart on Wednesday for the holiday. “The snow isn’t coming until after Valentine’s Day.” He noticed, but didn’t explain, the warnings about significant snowfall for the weekend. “But there are lots of other fun things we can do before then. We haven’t gone to see the bakery, or the fishing store, or visited the frozen waterfall yet.”
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