by Maisey Yates
Lark looked miffed. “Maybe I’m not drifting. I didn’t drift back here. I drove.”
“It’s not about perfection,” Avery said. “It’s just about commitment.”
Hannah nodded, the truth of her sister’s words sinking in. Maybe she hadn’t spoken marriage vows to her violin or anything half that insane, but it was about the commitment to the dream. To the future. That she knew she had chosen the right life for herself.
“I guess I’ve never felt that committed to anything.”
But there was an odd note in her sister’s voice. Lark, for all her sunny openness, was difficult to pin down. Like trying to put a sunbeam in a jar.
“Do you feel that committed to the Craft Café?” Avery asked.
“Yes,” Lark said. “Yes,” she breathed the word the second time. “This is what I want. And I’m here. I’m home and I... I need to lean into it.” She leveled her gaze at Hannah. “I need some of your certainty.”
Yes. Her certainty. Which often cut like a knife, slashing at anyone who might be in her way. It had certainly done its job disemboweling Josh.
She’d wasted more time questioning that than she cared to admit now.
Crying in her dorm at the University she had dreamed about all of her life. Curled up on the floor, her face wet from tears. Her soul feeling depleted at the cost it had poured out in order to be there.
She’d thought about cutting herself open then. But instead she had lain there and repeated the mantra that had gotten her there in the first place. She was special. She was meant to be there.
She was going to achieve her dreams.
She had paid the price. The cost of admission.
Regrets were for other people, and Hannah wasn’t like other people.
She never had been. Her drive, her feelings, had always mystified her family. Her parents had been utterly bemused by her certainty that violin was all she wanted to do.
She’d had to walk herself to lessons, and when things had gotten too expensive she’d had to take odd jobs to pay for all the lessons she needed. She’d started taking the bus to lessons with Marc Deveraux because he’d been the best. And when it had become clear that the school she wanted to attend would be too expensive for her parents, she’d set her sights on doing whatever she had to in order to get a full ride scholarship.
“Do you know what you’re looking for?” Avery asked.
Hannah startled, because for a moment she thought that Avery had been talking to her. And for some reason the idea of trying to answer that question made her uneasy.
“I know what I want to feel,” Lark said.
“You can’t only rely on feelings, Lark,” Avery said, her tone sage.
If it rankled Lark, she didn’t show it. Which Hannah thought was a feat, since it wasn’t even directed at her and she found it maternal and annoying.
“How did you go from vine trysts to domestic life, Avery?” Hannah asked.
Since they were all standing there in a place that very much represented before, standing in a place of tea parties and first times as women and not girls.
“It’s what you do,” Avery said. “Right?”
“Not what I did,” Hannah said.
“Well, no. But you...you have the violin and I don’t have that. I didn’t have art. I wasn’t particularly great at...anything. I did the young and wild thing and now I’m doing real life.”
“Do you really not think you’re talented, Avery?” Lark asked, frowning.
Hannah appraised her older sister, who had always been...contained. It had never occurred to her she’d once done wild things. Had she wanted to do something other than get married and have kids?
“I’m very organized,” she said. “And I use it to my advantage. Anyway, it’s not like any path is a wild, raucous ride. Eventually even dreams are work, right?”
Hannah had to agree with that.
Lark nodded slowly. “Yes and sometimes you outgrow dreams.”
Hannah looked at her sisters and felt the strangest sense of recognition wash over her. The girls they’d been here, the women they were now.
“That’s when you change,” Lark added. “I’m on a quest to happiness. Via quilts and flower crowns. And memories of Gram.”
“It’s as good a path as any,” Hannah said.
This was all well and good. This nostalgia. Even if it was sharp and uncomfortable sometimes for her. But it didn’t change anything.
Because Hannah Ashwood hadn’t done much changing in recent years, and that was by design. She wasn’t that bright burning girl who had destroyed herself here. And she wasn’t that weak, sad creature that had wept on that bathroom floor.
She’d put all that away.
She had emerged from all of it stronger. With some very clear decisions made.
Lark might be on a quest to find herself. But Hannah already knew who she was. She might have been momentarily diverted by the nostalgia of Josh Anderson. But momentary was all it was.
It was all it could ever be.
9
I don’t have words. I don’t have tears. My whole body is pain, and I don’t think it will ever end. He’s gone. He will not return home. I will not have my love. And our baby will have no father.
Dot’s diary, June 1944
Lark
The café had been bustling all morning, and Lark had been busy, wearing her flower crown, which was now a little bit wilted. Her encounter with Ben had her a little bit...jittery, but her conversation with her sisters yesterday had put something whole and hopeful in place in her heart.
A promise of the healing she’d come here looking for. Avery being a sexual rebel had been something of a shock, and Hannah’s...softness over Josh had fascinated her.
It made her feel a kinship to her sister. Of course, she hadn’t shared about her own heartbreak. She felt a little bit guilty about it, actually.
She’d just found it easier—for years—to let them have their own narrative about her. Lark the youngest, so carefree.
It kept her from having to talk about the things that hurt her. The things that she had cared about desperately.
As if her thoughts had conjured him out of the air, she looked up and out the window and saw him through the wavy, antique glass.
She didn’t even have to see him clearly to know it was him. Her body recognized him. Her heart fully lurched in her chest.
And it took her a moment to realize he was with someone. He bent down and hugged a small, slender figure with blond hair, the same color as his own.
Keira?
No. Keira was a brunette, not that hair color couldn’t change, but she wouldn’t look good as a blonde. Not being rude, it was just true.
They parted and he walked past the shop, toward his garage and out of Lark’s view, and by the time she realized she was staring after him, the door opened, and the person he’d hugged walked in.
She was a teenager. A girl who had been in a couple of times in the last few weeks but suddenly it was like everything crystalized and she could see it.
Oh.
She had his eyes. The same blue, and her hair the same sandy blond. Her nose was like Keira’s, so was her smile.
Seeing Ben’s and Keira’s features blended together was a particular pain she hadn’t been prepared for.
For the first time, she wished her mother were a little bit more of a gossip. But the woman was resolutely closemouthed about the people in the community. Or maybe... Maybe she just knew that the topic of Ben would not be overly welcome.
But oh, Lark wished she would’ve known this.
Right. Ben and Keira have been married for sixteen years, and you figured they wouldn’t have kids?
You went out of your way to not know that. It’s why you don’t talk to anybody. It’s why you’re happy to let them all think you
just breeze through life and don’t think about a thing. So they won’t talk to you. So they won’t ask.
“Hi,” Lark said. “I... Hi.”
She suddenly had no idea what to say. This girl had just been a customer—granted she was thankful for every one—a couple of days ago. One she identified by the latte she ordered and the bracelet she was working on.
And now...now she knew that the girl was Ben’s daughter.
Ben’s daughter.
“Hi,” she said, looking at Lark like she was a weirdo.
Well, Lark felt a little like a weirdo at the moment.
“Did you want your honey latte?”
“Yeah,” she said, undoing her backpack and getting out the small kit of beads that she had bought from Lark over a week ago.
Lark had given her and some friends a brief tutorial on how to do beading, and they had all been excited by how easily she picked it up, and had jumped right in.
Of course, her friends weren’t here today.
“Don’t you have school?”
“I guess. I’m skipping.”
“And your...your dad is okay with that?”
The girl shrugged, laying her beads out in front of her, and her work in progress. “I don’t think he loves it. But... You know, he’s one of those parents. He would rather I tell him than have me hiding things from him so he makes a big effort not to freak out when I tell him something. This morning I told him I wasn’t in the mood to go to school.”
She had not imagined Ben would be some new age dad.
“Admirable,” Lark said, ignoring that this was an extremely uncomfortable conversation for her in many ways. “Although my mom would skin me alive.”
“Well, if my mom had bothered to stick around, then she would get to have a say in whether or not I went to school. But she didn’t. So, it’s up to my dad. Who is terrified that I will sink into a life of sex and drugs. He likes rock ’n’ roll, so he doesn’t seem all that worried about that one.”
The girl’s sudden anger was shocking, but not half so much as the revelation that Keira had left. Keira had left Ben. And her daughter.
“Keira.” Lark hadn’t meant to say it out loud. “Your mom, Keira?”
She frowned. “Do you... How did you know that’s my mom’s name?”
“I’m sorry. I... I saw your dad when he dropped you off this morning and I... I know him. I knew him. And your mom. In high school.”
“You don’t seem like you’re my parents’ age,” she said, looking extremely uncomfortable.
Lark didn’t know if she was complimented by that or not. But right now she couldn’t make much sense of anything.
“I don’t want to pry, and I don’t want to push you to talk about something that you don’t want to, but your mom...”
“She left. Like three years ago. She just... Left us. Sometimes she’ll text or something. But not really. It’s like she went crazy. Like she turned into another person. Everything was fine, and then she... She just... She quit. Like it was a job. A job she didn’t want anymore.”
Keira and Ben.
So much of her world was shaped around them.
Around their inevitability.
And now they were just...divorced?
Keira had won. She’d gotten Ben. She’d had his heart, his love, since they were teenagers. He’d married her. Had a child with her.
She’d gotten Lark’s dream and she’d walked away from it.
“I had no idea,” Lark said. “I... Is your dad... Is he okay?”
“No. Of course, he would never say that. He doesn’t like to talk about feelings.”
“No kidding,” Lark said.
“You knew both of them. Both of my parents.”
“Yeah. You know. We had a friend group.”
Her head was pounding. Lark wasn’t a terribly angry person. But it was like acid in her gut, in her soul, filling her with rage. Keira had quit them like a job. That’s what the girl had said.
“That’s weird,” she said, “to think of them...having friends. Or being friends. They didn’t like each other very much in the end there. He really doesn’t like her now.”
Those words twisted in that cavern carving itself out in Lark’s chest. Cut a deep groove in her soul.
They didn’t even like each other now.
She felt betrayed.
Deeply.
Utterly.
“Did you want a cookie or anything?” Lark asked. Because she didn’t know what else to do or say.
“Oh. I...”
“On the house.”
“Sure.”
She took a cookie from the glass jar on the counter and set it on a plate, pushing it toward the girl. “My name is Lark, by the way.”
“Taylor.”
“I’m sorry you’re having a bad day.”
She nodded. “Some days are okay.”
Lark looked at that young face. She was probably fifteen and she’d already experienced a cut that deep. That some days you could breathe, and some you couldn’t. Some days you felt normal and other days...well other days you skipped school and talked to strangers about your pain while eating a cookie.
“Yeah,” Lark said. “Some days will be. And eventually more days will be okay than not.”
She looked down. “That sounds more realistic than what a lot of people say. That it will all be okay.”
Lark shook her head. And this time she thought of her mom. Her mom who had been abandoned by her mother. “No. It won’t all be okay.”
Taylor smiled, just a slight lift of the corners of her mouth. “Thanks. I mean it.”
Here she was, giving Keira’s daughter the life advice her former friend wasn’t here to give. Lark could hardly breathe past that.
Another customer came in and took Lark’s attention for a moment, and then Taylor sat absorbed in her work, and Lark let her have it.
Around dinnertime, the girl hopped off the stool. “I’m going to go get my dad for food. He forgets to...you know, eat. He’ll just work.”
She had to take care of him, and that made Lark feel a host of things too.
“Yeah, I... Nice to meet you, Taylor.”
“You too.”
But even after Taylor left, and the shop emptied out, Lark didn’t feel alone.
Because her every heartbeat seemed to say his name. Over and over. After all that time of doing her best not to think of him at all.
She had her business up and running. She had a flower crown, wilting thought it was. And ancient history was exactly that. Ancient history.
Seeing him the other night when she’d gone to the garage had thrown her, and meeting his daughter had been a shock. Finding out about his divorce was a shock.
She wasn’t here to walk along old roads, she was here to find new ones in old spaces. She didn’t want to go back to the person she was, she wanted to find a better version of the person she was now.
But this was exactly why when she came back to visit her family, she didn’t loiter around town. This was why she made her visits brief. And infrequent.
And of course, she had moved back home without fully taking that on board.
She turned to the sink full of dishes and began to scrub angrily at some of the mugs. And slowly, clarity washed over her. Maybe it was the physical labor. Maybe it was the flower crown. Maybe it was the confrontation—so quickly—with one of the thorniest bits of home.
It was a good thing. This was exactly the kind of thing she needed to face down. Because she couldn’t let old memories and feelings matter that much.
Because disconnected from the source a real life memory could become a fantasy. Hazy, fuzzy, and mostly lies. A fantasy didn’t have boundaries. It could build itself into the most unobtainable joy, or the darkest of nightmares.
&nbs
p; Ben Thompson was neither.
Taylor.
Apparently, his daughter was Taylor.
And her mother was gone.
She swallowed hard past the lump in her throat.
She looked around the room. “You would think this was funny,” she said to the air, hoping that her grandmother’s spirit was lingering in the walls, just enough to be amused by all the drama.
Gram would have popped a piece of candy in her mouth, adjusted her glasses and smiled. “Life has a sick sense of humor. The trick is to make sure yours is even more twisted.”
That’s what she would’ve said.
It was just too bad she wasn’t here to say it.
But even if she had been... Even if she had been, Lark wouldn’t have told her it was what she needed to hear.
And suddenly it made her sad that it was so much easier to talk to a ghost that it was to talk to somebody living.
10
We circle the wagons at night for safety. The men keep watch. One in particular is always watching. I’m told his name is John.
Anabeth Snow’s diary, 1864
Avery
“We can have keto friendly snacks at the trivia night.”
Avery was trying to listen to Alyssa talk about the upcoming event. But since it was intermingled with humble bragging about the progress on her diet and her daughter being student of the month, Avery was finding it difficult. She should be enjoying the respite. She was having a rare afternoon coffee, after all.
She’d considered going to the Craft Café, but Alyssa had wanted a very specific gluten-free something at the coffee house.
And as happy as she was to have a coffee break, Avery was antsy to get back to the quilting project. There was something about it that soothed her right now.
Maybe it was how it reminded her of Gram. How it connected her to those days she’d been aching for so much lately.
Simpler times.
Just her and her sisters sitting at a tiny table in the back of The Miner’s House, beading and bickering, but united under the watchful eye of Gram, who had a counter full of candy, and an endless stash of gum.