On Folly Beach (5 page)

Emmy found fleeting relief in the stacks of books in her mother’s store. The silent words on the written page comforted her just as they had when she was a child, and she welcomed the forced solitude of sorting and shelving books. She left the customers and sympathy sayers to her mother, finding solace in the dusty back room office. The pain and emptiness couldn’t find her there, where she kept her mind too busy to think.

Every once in a while, Emmy would consider resuming the life she’d planned before she met Ben. With her master’s in library science, she’d once dreamed of being a curator for a museum or university with a large manuscript and rare-book collection. Her joy of dissecting the past through the study of fading words and brittle paper had come as a surprise to many in her small town, but not to her mother. Paige had named her only daughter after the author of her favorite book, Wuthering Heights, after all.

Following graduation, Emmy had chosen to work in her mother’s store while waiting to find a job in her field, anticipating what corner of the world she’d end up in, when Ben Hamilton had walked in one afternoon in search of a book for his niece. Emmy had been in the process of rereading Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and she’d been almost convinced that her Mr. Darcy had entered the shop. Newly minted from Officer Candidate School, Ben was tall and blond and in uniform. He invited her to have coffee with him, and then dinner. Within the month they were engaged, and six months later, they were married. And it never occurred to Emmy to wonder where her dreams had gone. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved the idea of them; it was simply that she loved Ben more. Now that he was gone, those dreams were like the stuffed animals and faded corsages that still decorated her childhood bedroom; remnants of her life before Ben.

The bell rang over the store’s front door, but she didn’t get up to see who it was. It was only seven thirty in the morning, before the store opened, and she knew it was her mother coming to argue with her again about not sleeping, or working too hard, or not eating enough. She wanted to tell Paige that as soon as she figured out the right way to grieve, she’d stop doing all those things that seemed to irritate her mother.

“I brought you breakfast,” her mother said from the doorway.

Emmy didn’t look up, but continued typing. “I already ate. But thank you.”

“They’re your favorite—honey wheat bagels from Crandall’s Bakery. They’re still warm.”

Emmy paused and looked over at her mother. “Maybe later. Just leave them behind the counter.”

Instead of leaving, Paige stayed where she was, watching Emmy closely. For the first time in a long while, Emmy really looked at her mother, noticing the fine lines around her eyes and mouth, the way her frown seemed almost permanent. And how the sadness Emmy knew she carried with her always seemed to be closer to her skin now, showing through in small patches like a molting snake. It was as if the sadness had grown too big for her mother, finally surpassing Paige’s capacity to hold it in anymore.

Emmy also noticed that Paige wasn’t carrying the expected bakery bag, but instead held a glass mason jar. The glass was fogged and blotched as if handled a great deal, and the metal lid had long since darkened. Curious now, Emmy stood and walked toward her mother.

“What’s that?”

Instead of answering Paige held it out, and after hesitating for a moment, Emmy took it. It shifted in her hands, a soft rolling like an ocean wave, and when she lifted the jar to eye level, she saw what it was.

“It’s a jar of sand,” she said, knowing as she spoke that it was more than that—that somehow the sand was part of her mother, as much as her green eyes and curly hair. It was the part of her mother that she’d never shared with Emmy before.

“From Folly Beach. My mother scooped it up and put it in this jar and gave it to me on my wedding day. She said that way I’d never forget where I came from.”

But you did, Emmy wanted to say, but remained silent because the sand in the jar had become warm under her touch, as if it were remembering the South Carolina sun.

Instead she asked, “Why are you giving it to me?”

Paige leaned against the doorframe, her face reflecting her exhaustion. “Because. . . .” She was silent for a moment. “Because this”—she indicated the room and the Indiana world outside the walls—“isn’t all there is. It’s safe and familiar, but it’s not the rest of your life.”

A bubble of anger erupted in the back of Emmy’s mind. “I’m happy here.”

“No, you’re not. You think you are because you don’t know any different.”

Emmy squinted her eyes, trying to recognize the woman who sounded so much like her mother—the mother who’d given Emmy a roof over her head, good food to eat, and clothes on her back, but nothing that could have been called guidance. Emmy had always thought it had grown from her mother’s heart being broken too many times with the deaths of her babies; there simply hadn’t been enough remaining to hold another child.

Emmy thought of the attic stocked with folded-up easels, dried-up and clotted paints, and half-finished canvases. It was the attic that had been off-limits to Emmy during her childhood, making it an irresistible temptation that she’d succumbed to many times following arguments with her mother. The paintings were the part of her mother she didn’t know—the part of the girl Paige had been before she’d married Emmy’s father. Paige had caught her up there once, but instead of anger, Emmy had seen only resignation, like accepting a diagnosis long after the tumor had been excised.

Her mother had told her that the paintings had been part of her application to art school in Rhode Island, but that had been before she’d met Emmy’s father, Bill. They had never spoken of it again, but every once in a while, when she saw her mother staring out a window or holding a forgotten cup of coffee until it got cold, she pictured the girl with dreams of being an artist carefully hidden inside the face of a woman who chose to paint the colors of her walls beige.

Emmy stood to face her mother, feeling defiant, the jar in her hands still warm. “But you do know different, and you’re still here.”

As if Emmy hadn’t spoken, Paige said, “Do you know why coyotes are found in almost every state now? Because they adapt. They find that what they really wanted isn’t what they need, that there’s something just as good someplace else. It’s how they survive.” She paused a moment. “It’s been six months, Emmy. I’ve held my tongue while I’ve watched you stumble through your days like a drunk woman, but it’s past time that you pull yourself together. You need to make a change or you will never get over this.”

Emmy’s anger felt muffled, as if she sensed that her mother might be right. “Maybe I don’t want to get over Ben. He was the best thing that ever happened to me. And this is my home, Mama. Leaving would be like leaving Ben, and that would be like him dying all over again.”

Paige pressed the back of her head against the doorframe and closed her eyes as if summoning strength. “Sometimes, just when we think we can see our lives on course and we can settle back and get comfortable, a new path opens. Some people just keep going, too scared to veer off the familiar path. But others, well, they step off into the unknown, and find that maybe that was where they were supposed to be all along.”

Emmy tasted salt on her lips and realized that she was crying. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Mama. There is no other path. This is my home.”

Paige stepped forward and cupped her hands over Emmy’s as she clutched the jar. “I do know. I’ve never veered off course. But you’ve been given a second chance. And you”—she pressed a finger gently against Emmy’s chest above where her heart beat—“you’re one of those other people. I think I’ve known that since you were little.” She sighed, her warm breath reminding Emmy of being rocked as a child. “Maybe that’s why there’s this distance between us. You were going to leave me eventually, and I didn’t want it to hurt too much.”

“I’m not going to leave at all.” Emmy turned around and placed the jar of sand on the desk, but found to her surprise that some of the sand had managed to stick to her fingers, lingering like an unwanted thought. This was not the heart-to-heart conversation she’d always imagined other girls had with their mothers, or the one she’d always wanted to have with her own. This was a conversation that could culminate only with one of them saying good-bye, and after all the years of waiting, it was still too soon. “I can’t. You need me here, in the store. And Dad, too.” She thought of the morning coffee and newspaper she delivered to her father every morning, how she reminded him when it was time to cut his hair or put on a sweater. She didn’t say it because it had long since become obvious that he allowed her to do those things to make her feel needed.

Paige smiled faintly, as if reading Emmy’s thoughts and agreeing with them. “Life should be a question, Emmy, and you’re way too young to think you’ve already found all the answers.”

Emmy wanted to protest, to tell her mother that she was wrong, but she recognized the grain of truth in Paige’s words, heard them in her heart as if she’d always known them to be true but had denied them anyway. She tried a new tack. “I can’t go to South Carolina. I don’t know anybody, and how would I support myself ?” She tasted the loneliness already, like a bitter candy slow to melt.

Paige moved into the room toward the stack of boxes brought in the previous day by the UPS man. Paige sorted through them, sliding off a smaller box to reveal a large square one on the bottom of the pile. “I was on eBay a couple of weeks ago, looking for used books for our new trade-in section of the store. I’ve found that boxes from estate sales give me the best deals because usually whoever packs them up has no idea what’s in them and is just too happy to get rid of them and prices them accordingly.”

Bending over, she wrapped her arms around the big box and slid it closer to Emmy. “And that’s how I found this.”

Emmy tilted her head to read the shipping label: FOLLY’S FINDS. “Is that a store?”

Paige nodded. “It is. Or used to be. Apparently the owner is retiring and selling inventory. I used to love the store. It was run by two older ladies. The younger one had a sort of side business crafting bottle trees and selling them from the back of the store. It’s where I got mine from, actually. Their last name was Shaw or O’Shea or something like that. It was more of a general store at one time, but the book section kept growing, so that became their main focus after a while. They carried all of the great classics, and they had a pretty extensive travel section. But they had an entire back corner of the store devoted strictly to romances.” A look of whimsy passed over Paige’s face, surprising Emmy. “I’ve tried to reconstruct that atmosphere here, although I don’t know if I’ve got it quite right. It was a magical place to be, which is probably why I thought to open up my own store.”

Emmy reached over to the desk and took a pair of scissors from the pencil holder and sliced through the line of tape that covered the top of the box but didn’t move to open the flaps. “I don’t understand. What does any of this have to do with me?”

“When I realized where the books were from, I called the store. The current owner is an Abigail something-or-other, who is apparently the daughter-in-law of one of the two women I remembered from the store. She’s been unable to sell the business as is and thought that if she sold the inventory she’d have a better chance of selling the building for a different kind of business.” Her eyes narrowed as she closely considered her daughter. “She also told me that in recent years they’ve become well-known for their rare books and manuscripts—although that’s mostly online, with her acting as a broker of sorts.”

Despite herself, Emmy felt a flutter of interest. But then she thought of Ben, and how this was the place she’d known him and loved him. As if somehow all of her memories of him were tied to this one spot in the universe and would disappear without her there to hold them down.

She turned back to the computer and sat down. “I can’t afford it, even if I wanted it.” Emmy swallowed, waiting for the flutter to disappear, and for her mother to agree.

“But you can, Emmy. You have the money from the house, and from Ben. His final gift to you.”

Emmy felt overwhelmed suddenly, with grief and loss and the glimmer of possibility. It scared her, made her feel like a small child letting go of her mother’s hand in a crowded place.

“I can’t,” she said again, sounding halfhearted even to herself.

“Yes, you can. You will. Ben chose you because of your strength. Don’t disappoint him.”

Emmy looked up at her mother with surprise. “He told you that?”

Paige shook her head. “He didn’t have to. I’ve known it since the moment you were born. You didn’t try to focus on my face like most babies; you were already looking behind me to find what else was out there.”

Emmy brought her eyebrows together. “You didn’t want me to marry Ben, did you?”

Paige closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. Finally, she said, “This isn’t about him anymore. You can choose to unpack your bags at the detour sign and dig a trench for the long haul, or you can make your own detour.”

She retrieved the jar of sand and placed it in Emmy’s hands again. “You can always come back, you know. You’ll always have a home here with us. But that would be a lot like planting a rose in the desert; you’d survive but you’d never really bloom.”

When she started to move away, Emmy grabbed her hand. “Why are you doing this?”

Paige pulled away and moved to the door, stepping over a small corrugated box. Without turning around, she paused and said, “Because you’re my daughter. Because you’re the me I never let myself be.” She shrugged. “I’ve never known how to love you, Emmy. You’ve always been so damned independent. Maybe I’ve finally figured out that to love you means letting you go.”

Emmy let her head sag as she spoke, her voice thick with tears. “I loved him, Mama. I loved him more than I ever thought possible, and I can’t just make that go away. I don’t want it to. And I can’t help thinking that the best thing that’s ever happened to me has already happened.”