A groan filtered across the line. “I’m sorry, Eva. I just . . . can’t.”
6
Finally. A Friday night when Angela didn’t have to rush to bed thanks to an early Saturday shift at the spa. It had been two weeks since she’d given her notice, and now they could begin to find their new normal as a family.
She pulled zucchini bread from Sherry’s oven. “Perfect.” The loaf was just wet enough on top that it was sure to be decadent throughout. She placed it on the counter to cool next to several loaves of banana bread and cookies Sherry had made earlier in the day.
Her mother-in-law looked up from the German chocolate cake she was making and turned off the handheld mixer. “Smells divine.”
At only sixty years young, Sherry was average in height and weight with more gray than blonde up top. But despite losing both of her sons, and her husband a few years before that, somehow she radiated peace and kindness. And Angela was the beneficiary much more often than she deserved. She wouldn’t have survived without Sherry and her willingness to keep the kids when Angela had to work on the weekends or after school hours.
Angela allowed a smile to settle on her lips. When had the gesture become so foreign? “Just like you taught me.”
When she and Wes first married, Angela had known nothing about homemaking. But Sherry had shown her young daughter-in-law the ropes—not only in how to make bread rise, but in how to raise a baby.
Once she’d finished mixing her cake, Sherry poured it into a greased cake pan. “The kiddos will probably want dessert soon.” They’d already eaten dinner by the time Angela arrived to pick them up. Work had run over again today, and Sherry had offered to snag the kids from group and feed them her famous lasagna.
“Zach mentioned needing some of your cookies.” All three kids were watching old home videos of Wes and Brent in the living room. Angela had hated to pull them away when she’d arrived, so she had gladly complied when Sherry asked for some baking assistance. “Should I take them some?”
“If you’d like. But there’s something I’d like to talk about first, if you don’t mind.” Her mother-in-law adjusted the temperature on the oven and slid in her cake.
“Of course.” Angela snagged a few cookies off the counter and sat at the table. “Is everything all right?”
“Oh yes.” Sherry poured two glasses of milk and set one in front of Angela, then joined her. “Eva called last night.” A pause. “She told me you still haven’t decided about the ultra-marathon.”
Oh, Eva. She’d been so persistent since her initial call on Tuesday, even after Angela’s firm no—make that nos. Her sister-in-law just couldn’t understand why Angela wouldn’t consider the race. But that shouldn’t surprise Angela. The two of them lived very different lives.
Angela bit into a cookie and took a large gulp of milk. “I have decided. I told her no. Several times.”
“That’s certainly your right. But I’m curious why you shot the idea down so soundly.”
What was Sherry getting at? It wasn’t like her to butt into Angela’s business. “You know how crazy life is for me. It’s getting a little more manageable now that I don’t have two jobs, but I’ve got new responsibilities because of the promotion, and those come with a learning curve. I can’t add in something like training for a race, not to mention leaving the kids for several weeks to go halfway across the world. Life would spin completely out of control.”
Silence ensued as Sherry’s face tightened. “And control is something you feel you have currently?”
The woman had a point. “No, but it’s something to strive for. Obviously there are some things I can’t control, one of them being the hours I have to work to keep us afloat. My children lost their father, and I’m gone enough from them already. We have to make time together a priority, and I can’t do that if I’m flitting off to run all the time. And for what? Something that’s not going to bring their dad back. But me—I’m flesh and bone. I’m still here. And they need me.”
“Yes, you’re here physically.” Sherry placed her hand over her own heart. “But what about in here? Angela, forgive me for saying so, but I think your children feel like they lost both of you when Wesley died.”
The remains of her cookie crumbled in Angela’s hand. First Juliet. Now Sherry. Did the whole world think she was a bad mother? Yes, sixteen years ago she’d seriously considered whether she wanted to sacrifice her dreams and plans on the altar of motherhood, but she’d tried to dedicate herself to the job as fully as possible once Kylee arrived.
“They said that?”
“Not in so many words.”
Using her napkin, Angela scrubbed at the smushed chocolate on her hand. How had she tried so hard and still failed to be what her children needed? “I don’t know what else to do.”
Sherry got up and sliced a piece of the banana bread, then worked a knife full of butter across it, back and forth, slow, methodical. “Do you remember when I went on that retreat to Canada all by myself a few months after Roy died?” She plated the slice and reached for another.
“Yes.”
Sherry had gone to the same place where she and her husband had honeymooned thirty-five years before. She’d been lost in her grief, and Angela and Wes hadn’t known how to help her.
“I came back a changed woman. Met God there in a way I didn’t expect.” She returned to the table and slid one of the plates of butter-slathered bread in front of Angela, then sat again with her own plate. “I didn’t come back all better. When you’ve known great loss, grief never goes away. Yes, it will lessen, and it won’t be this pulse always beating quite so strongly in time with your heart. But it changes you, becomes part of who you are, the way you function.”
Had losing Wes really changed Angela? Sure, it had acutely changed her circumstances. But the change inside of her? That had been happening long before she got the worst call of her life. “I’m glad that trip was beneficial to you, Sherry. But I’m not quite sure what it has to do with me.”
“I suppose I just wanted to communicate that, for me, it took something drastic to help me shake off the funk I was feeling. To embrace the new order of things, a world in which I didn’t necessarily have control. Receiving that truth changed my perspective. About life. Death. Even about my husband.”
Surely Sherry didn’t know of the conflict Angela felt deep inside. The ache. The wondering. The anger. All the emotions swirling together. The ones she never let through to the surface—because if she did, she feared the volcano that might erupt and the damage those emotions could do.
She’d already seen the results of the tiny fissure she’d allowed to develop earlier this week when she’d yelled at Kylee.
“Did you . . .” Angela couldn’t form the words. The heat from the stove seemed to reach across the room and suffocate her. “Did you find that you understood Roy more? After—” The last word broke.
Sherry’s eyes crinkled with compassion. “For me, there was freedom in giving myself permission to explore all of my emotions, no matter how guilty they made me feel—and no matter how scary they were to face.”