“I’m so glad you came,” I said, sidling up to her next to the fence. She had been watching you climb in and out of that wagon.
“I’m so glad you let me,” she answered.
“You’re always welcome. Michael would have never wanted you to be apart from Rose.”
She turned to me and I could see white lines on her cheeks where tears had eaten away her makeup and the wind had blown them dry. “I hate that we have to say things like that. Michael would have wanted this or Michael would have been happy about that. He should be here.”
“I know,” I said. I leaned into her, rested my temple on her shoulder.
She tilted her head on top of mine and let out a long sigh. “I miss him so much,” she said.
I didn’t say “I know” that time. Because I didn’t know. I knew what it was like to miss Michael, yes, but I had no idea what it was like to miss your child. I couldn’t take that extra grief away from her. It was hers alone, and one I never want to experience. I’d been completely self-absorbed for most of the early months of your life, and still I couldn’t imagine being without you.
You are sunshine. You are birdsong. You are the tinkling of golden coins. You are everything.
Your “aunties” Melinda, Karen, and Joanna came to the party, too, of course.
Melinda looked nearly ready to pop, as she once told me I had looked. She said her back was hurting and her ankles were swollen and she couldn’t wait to get this baby out of her. She already knew she was having a boy. She’d already named him. Paul Junior. Not very creative, but given the hell the two of them had gone through to get to this point, it seemed pretty perfect.
She told me, over huge breakfasts in the back booth that faced the bus crash divots, that she was still terrified. She said she had nightmares where she was still at her old job, and they got a call, and when they arrived, it was her baby who needed the ambulance. She said she’d had that nightmare a dozen times and never once was she able to save Paul Junior. When she told me this story, her fingers shook around her fork and she stopped eating.
“Do you ever wish he hadn’t been in your life in the first place?” she asked.
It took me a minute to even figure out what, or who, she was talking about. And then it dawned on me that she was talking about Michael. “What? Of course not,” I said, and I’d said it so quickly and with such certainty that it really hit me for the first time. Even if I’d known, way back during that frat party, that I was going to lose your father so soon, I still would have loved him. I still would have married him. I still would have tried to get pregnant with you. My memories with Michael are some of my most precious. Why would anyone want to give those up for safety?
Melinda nodded and went back to eating, smiling as if I’d done her a big favor just then. She was the one who’d given me the gift.
Auntie Joanna came carrying a huge teddy bear. So big I couldn’t even see her head over the top of it. She laughed when she sat it on the ground, and you immediately toddled over and tackled it, toppling over it clumsily. Joanna had broken up with her girlfriend, Sutton, a few months before, her only reason that she wasn’t quite ready to be tied down. She wanted to catch up on the dating the rest of us had done in high school and college, when she’d been too busy hiding. She wanted to try out love and lust and hand-holding and innocent kisses in public. She was currently dating a girl named Heather, but it wasn’t serious. Joanna didn’t have time for much dating, anyway. She’d gotten a huge lead role in a production at the community college. She was going back to school. She smiled a lot and told me funny stories and sang for me and once, last September, we ate slices of Boston cream pie right there on the lawn of the Tea Rose Diner. You slept in your infant carrier next to us, the sunlight making your eyelids nearly translucent.
Karen and Marty came to your party together. Karen had cut her hair, colored and straightened it, and bought some new clothes. She looked decades younger. She brought her grandson, Marcus, with her. Marcus is probably your best playmate right now, Rose, and he is so protective of you. Like a little mother hen, following you around, telling you “no” when you reach for something dangerous.
Her son, Travis, who you’ve never met and probably never will, was back in jail, this time for robbing a convenience store. Sometime during the weeks that followed, Travis’s girlfriend, Kendall, disappeared. Took a bunch of jewelry from Karen’s jewelry box and split. Karen was now a parent to a nearly two-year-old boy. But she seemed very happy about it and kept going on about do-overs and how you can’t predict life, no matter how hard you try. I’ve already learned that with you, Rose—that as a parent, you always wonder if you could have done it better.
Things were so busy at the party, with the cake and the presents and the chasing around toddlers and cousins and refilling drinks, I barely had the chance to talk to Melinda, Joanna, and Karen at all. Not that not talking to them would be a huge deal. We talk every single day. We meet for coffee at the Tea Rose Diner most mornings, even if for just a few moments. It’s our spot. The spot where we all got our second chances.
But as people began to clear out, and you curled up on the giant teddy bear and dozed off, I made my way over to them.
“Crazy,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Are birthday parties always this exhausting?”
Karen laughed, bouncing Marcus on one knee. “Only if you have them.”
“Well, I will be having them, so go ahead and mark your calendars now,” Melinda said.
“Your baby isn’t even born. How do we mark our calendars for a birthday that hasn’t happened yet?” Joanna asked.
Melinda rubbed her belly, thinking. “Just go ahead and block out the entire month of May for the rest of your lives.”
Marcus wiggled out of Karen’s lap and ran toward the tricycle that you had gotten and temporarily forgotten about. “Don’t get hurt,” Karen called, her hands trailing after him, as if she didn’t want to let go. That was when I noticed her finger.
“You’re engaged,” I said.
The other two gasped as she held her hand up for inspection. “Last night,” she said. “Isn’t it beautiful? I know I’m old to be starting over, but . . . life is funny sometimes, isn’t it?”
Life is funny sometimes. You can go from holding poster board next to this adorable frat guy to saying, “I do,” to watching that frat boy die, to watching his baby eat fistfuls of cake on her first birthday without even taking a breath between any of those things.
You can go from happiest girl in the world to sitting in a bathtub full of your own blood before your eyelashes bat once.
You can go from husbandless and friendless and hopeless to admiring the engagement ring of one of your best friends in the instant it takes to put your foot on the wrong pedal of a speeding bus.
Remember that, Rose. Remember that life is funny sometimes. Remember that things can change so quickly and so completely that you could never have predicted them, even if you’d been told to let loose your wildest thoughts. Maybe that was why your father was sent into our lives, Rose. Maybe he was here to teach us that you can’t predict life . . . but that unpredictable doesn’t equal bad.
“I should put Rose down for a nap,” I said, hurrying over to you. I plucked you out of the bear’s lap and felt the sweaty contours of you against my arms. You had a smear of icing across one cheek. Your dress was grass-stained. You smirked in your sleep, just the way Michael always had. I kissed your cheek, a perfect moment in the midst of a billion imperfect ones.
I carried you past Karen, Melinda, and Joanna as they chatted excitedly about wedding plans and baby kicks and theater. I listened to them all the way inside, until the walls muted their voices to whispers and then to silence. I smiled at my fortune. Can you believe that, Rose? I smiled at how lucky I was. How lucky I still am. Those three ladies kept me alive. Karen, Melinda, and Joanna were the reason I could smile.
On that day, I met Karen Freeman, Melinda Crocker, and Joanna Chambers.
They say you have friends for a reason, friends for a season, and friends for a lifetime.
Somehow I got lucky and got all three at once.
A CONVERSATION WITH JENNIFER SCOTT
Q. Second Chance Friends begins when a perfectly ordinary day in the lives of three different women, all of whom are having breakfast in a local diner, is disrupted by a car accident in the intersection outside. Why did you want to use that particular event to kick off the novel?
A. I love stories that explore connections. I think one of the most important tasks of our lives is making connections, even just in ordinary moments. But I’ve long wondered about connections made in extraordinary times as well. A few years ago, there was a horrific accident involving a school bus at a very busy intersection in my town. Certainly, there were many witnesses, and my heart went out to them. I began to wonder what would happen if a few of them continued to meet—even if accidentally at first. How would the uniqueness of what they experienced together affect their relationships with one another? Would they feel more connected? Would they forge friendships? Would they help one another get through the healing? This book had been writing itself in my head ever since.
Q. As the novel moves forward, the chapters are told from the perspectives of three different women: Karen, Melinda, and Joanna. They’re unique women with very different personalities. Yet you develop each one with rich details and careful attention. When you write different characters, do you love them all? Do they come to you fully formed or do you discover them along the way?
A. I do love them all, but there is usually one who will endear herself to me a little more than the others. She will speak the loudest and seem the most human to me. That doesn’t mean the others don’t also speak and seem human—it only means they’re a little quieter than she is. In this case, I felt a particular connection with Joanna. She had all this love and passion that she wanted to share, yet fear kept her in hiding. I think we can all relate to that on some level—fear of being who we really are—and know how painful and damaging that anxiety can be. I was really rooting for Joanna.
I like to get to know my characters as real people before I begin writing, so I spend a lot of time writing character sketches before I start each novel. I get to know their appearance and mannerisms, their worries and desires, their family dynamics and their motivations. Yet even after all of that work, they always still manage to surprise me at some point in the novel. So, yes, I begin with fully formed characters in mind . . . and, yes, I discover them along the way, too.
Q. There is, of course, a fourth woman in the novel, Maddie, who is pivotal to the story. We see her in many of the chapters, but we are shown her perspective only in the epilogue. Why did you make that choice?
A. Mostly because Maddie’s perspective would have been so bleak throughout most of the novel that I think it would have been too heavy and hopeless. With Karen, Melinda, and Joanna, they had their problems, and even had moments of real pain, but they were hopeful. They were reaching out and connecting with one another. Maddie had no faith, and she was pulling away, shutting herself off at every opportunity. It wasn’t until she’d begun to see that she had a future that I felt it was safe for her voice to shine through.
Q. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, you’ve also used quite a bit of humor in the book, especially between Karen and her friend Antoinette. Was it hard to balance the light and dark moments as you wrote?
A. Even though my novels often revolve around more somber subject matters, I have written a lot of humor, too. In fact, I wrote a weekly humor column for the Kansas City Star for more than four years. So humor comes very naturally for me, and sometimes I think we need those moments of levity, even in the gloomiest hours, just to take a breath and keep our sanity. It’s human nature to seek relief. So I wasn’t so much bogged down by trying to keep a balance as I was popping up with a reminder that there is a “better” out there waiting for the four friends (and for us) to arrive.
Q. At the end of the book, Maddie reflects, “They say you have friends for a reason, friends for a season, and friends for a lifetime.” This quote has the ring of knowledge handed down through the ages. Is it something you’ve heard before? Or something that came to you in the writing of this book?
A. I’ve heard this saying many times, and have always loved the truth of it. Sometimes I’ve even heard it taken a step further, that when you figure out which one of those things someone in your life is, you will know what to do with that person. I’ve tried to find the origin of the saying, but it doesn’t have a clear attribution that I can find.
Q. In your first work of women’s fiction, The Sister Season, you wrote about three estranged sisters returning home to the family farm. They are coming to celebrate the holidays, but they are also coming to bury their father. What one might have expected to be a joyful event becomes quite complicated. Here, you’ve begun with a tragic accident, and yet the four women the story focuses on actually grow through that event and rediscover joy at the end. Is it your hope to explore the unexpected emotional journeys we take in your stories?
A. Yes, I think life is one big unexpected emotional journey, and it’s what we do and learn along the way that makes us remarkable. I think that it’s in the moments of great joy and great sorrow that we find parts of ourselves we never knew existed, and sometimes what we find can be so profound as to change us forever. It’s rather amazing, when you think about it, how much there is to discover in even the darkest, dustiest, most frightening corners of our souls.
Q. Second Chance Friends is a rich, complicated book that will impress readers in different ways. Is there something you especially want readers to come away with after they’ve turned the final page?
A. That there is always opportunity for reaching out and connecting. I would hope for my readers to come away looking for places where they can connect with someone else, likely or unlikely, and be the blessing in that person’s life, even if only for a season.
Q. What’s next for you in your writing life?
A. One of the things I love most about writing is that I’m never quite sure what’s up next! I love to experiment and follow new stories and ideas and genres. But one thing I can be certain of is that I will continue to weave the threads of hope in tragedy, and the blessing of human connection—in ordinary times and extraordinary ones—into all of my stories.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Small-town diners are often pictured as meeting places—places where we can see familiar faces, catch up on the neighborhood gossip, and enjoy a sense of inclusion. This story begins in such a place. But with the rise of social media and electronic devices, we’re also finding virtual communities. Do you still find a sense of community in places such as diners and bookstores in your neighborhood? Do you participate in virtual communities? Do you find these two things at odds with each other? Do they enhance each other?
2. The story is told mostly from the point of view of three different women: Karen, Melinda, and Joanna. Did one of them resonate with you more than the others? If so, why? Do you find yourself often drawn to the same types of characters in the books you read?
3. After the accident, Karen, Melinda, and Joanna decide to search out Maddie, the young woman in the accident. They come, unbidden, into her life. Do you believe them when they say they’re acting purely out of concern for her? Are they being nosy? Are they being supportive? Are these two sides of the same coin?
4. Discuss the different issues of motherhood the characters struggle with as the story builds. Think of Karen and her wayward son, or Melinda, who quietly deceives her husband to avoid having a child, and Maddie, who initially doesn’t want the child she’ll have. H
ow do the women help one another through these issues? Does one of these issues resonate with you more than the others?
5. Romantic love and sexual identity are also issues confronting the characters. Think about their different conflicts in this area. Joanna, of course, comes readily to mind. But think also of Karen, who is in a very different phase of her life, and of Melinda, who is married. What challenges are they facing in their romantic lives? Do you think they work through them successfully? Do you feel they have work left to do when the story ends?
6. There are many secrets in this book—secrets the characters hide from themselves and from others. List the secrets you observe. Do they remain at the conclusion of the story? Do you have secrets you keep—from your friends, your family, or yourself? Do you think revealing them would help enrich your life? Are there times secrets are best kept concealed?
7. For women who become mothers, balancing the physical and emotional demands of a job with the role of motherhood can be difficult. In this story, Karen seems to be able to use her job to strengthen her position as a parent and grandparent. But Melinda decides she needs to leave her job as an EMT in order to be a mother. Do you understand their decisions? Do you believe them? Do you feel you’ve had to make similar choices in your own life?
8. For Joanna. the arts, and in particular theater, play a crucial role in her personal development. Has artistic expression helped you understand something about yourself?
9. The epilogue is a critical part of this story. What role does it play? Why do you imagine the author chose to write it in this format? And are the characters where you thought they might be in their lives?
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