Keeping busy so much better than trying to sleep.
“Well, we have to be sure,” Rachel said. “I don’t want anyone to be hungry.”
Those words gutted her with their absurdity. She didn’t want them to be hungry? They were grieving. A dinner roll wasn’t going to help with that.
“I don’t think anyone is going to go hungry,” Anna said, her voice soft and reassuring. “Anyway, I’ve baked fifteen pies, and there are some ladies from the church who are going to bring extra food just to be certain.”
“Okay,” Rachel said, her sister’s reassurance throwing her off-balance.
She knew that Anna did this. That she handled all kinds of difficult situations, but Rachel had never needed Anna to care for her.
She was used to being the one doing the caring.
“You’ve been constantly in our prayers, Rachel.”
Rachel gawked at her sister. Anna seemed smooth and serene, which was how she had been for the past fourteen years. Ever since marrying Thomas and settling into her role as pastor’s wife. It was like Rachel couldn’t touch her anymore.
“Thank you,” Rachel said.
And all she could think of was the great yawning distance between them.
She baked fifteen pies.
Yes. She had. But she would have done the same sort of thing for anyone.
“Thanks, Aunt Anna,” Emma said.
Her daughter’s sincere thank-you made Rachel feel slightly ashamed that she had reacted so angrily.
She took a deep breath. “You know we appreciate it. And I appreciate Thomas doing the service.”
“Of course,” Anna said, her smile the appropriate amount of sympathetic and warm.
It looked like a mask.
“All right, we have everything,” Wendy said, looking down at the checklist. She faced her daughters, her expression serious and determined. “We know how to do this. We know how to plan an amazing event. So let’s make this one worthy of Jacob.”
Rachel set aside her issues with Anna. She focused on the familiar motions that went into preparing for an event. Her daughter, her mother and her sister just being there made her feel less brittle. Made her feel like she might be able to keep going.
But then, when it was all done, and there was nothing left to prepare, she stood and looked around and realized Jacob was gone. Really gone.
And all that had been familiar a moment before felt dark and uncertain now.
She didn’t know how to live in a world without Jacob in it.
ANNA
Anna thought that her face might break. She had been smiling for the past two hours. Standing on this damp grass, her shoes sinking into the muck, the mist clinging to her hair and her grief clinging to her body like another skin.
And over it all, she wore that pastor’s-wife coat.
It had been the most important thing she’d put on this morning. Not her black shawl and black pants. Not her black boots.
“They need reassurance,” Thomas had said right before they had walked in. And the way that he looked at her—stone-faced enough that she thought he might finally have noticed the distance between them.
She couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched her.
Even when they’d walked into the funeral, they had done so side by side, with a healthy amount of space between them.
It felt like a metaphor for their marriage.
For her.
She’d gotten good at separate.
A kick sparked in her heart and she tamped it down, because she was here to be the pastor’s wife, not to think about anything else. She was here to support her sister, not to think about her own marriage.
But the loss of her sister’s husband had her thinking about marriage. And even more, about Jacob himself.
Jacob was way too young to be gone. She wondered if he’d ever felt like a soul trapped in a body that didn’t do the things he wanted, didn’t do the things he craved.
Because she did.
She did, and she wasn’t even sick. And it felt like an insult to his memory.
“Thank you for coming,” she said to two of the guests who were getting ready to leave.
“Thank you,” she said to someone else, who looked at her tearfully.
“Are you all right, Anna?”
“We will be,” Anna said.
“I’ll pray for you.”
It kept on like that for the next hour. Greetings and goodbyes, platitudes. She could think about entirely different things, stand there and smile, and say everything she was supposed to.
And her soul was bursting to escape.
She looked over at her mother, who looked like she’d aged years overnight. Which was something that Wendy McDonald would definitely not appreciate if anyone breathed a word of such a thing in her direction. Wendy looked over at Anna, and there was something far too perceptive in her mother’s gaze, even through the haze of grief.
Anna always felt like her mother could see it. That no matter how hard she tried to behave, her mother could see that there was something struggling against all of this inside her, and it made her feel transparent.
She had often thought, if she had to choose an era of the lighthouse that had the most relatable history to her, it would be the time it had played host to seventy American soldiers. Because she often felt like up here on the hill, she was keeping her head down and keeping up a brave front, while in reality, she always felt like she was about to be buffeted on all sides.
Dramatic, perhaps.
But, particularly as a teenager, the drama had suited her.
“Thank you so much,” she said.
“Can I do something for you, Anna?”
Anna jolted. She realized that she knew the woman that she was talking to more than just in passing. They went to several Bible studies together at church. Laura. Who was always friendly, and always seemed like she might want to spend more time with Anna, but Anna had been spending less time at church things and more time at the Lighthouse Inn.
“No,” Anna said. “I don’t need anything. Rachel... I’m just concerned about her.”
The lie tasted bitter on her tongue. But she lied a lot now. By omission. Without words. With a smile.
She couldn’t remember the exact moment she’d stopped feeling guilty.
“Of course,” Laura said.
“Thank you for asking.”
“If you ever want to go to coffee...”