Sneak Peak
Continue reading for a Sneak Peek:
Seattle
Summer, 1981
JO SAMPSON KNEW LIFE COULD always be worse. Logic—plus an MFA and doctorate in history—told her that life was often worse. Yet, today made her top five list of worst days.
“Mo-om.” Alec’s thirteen-year-old voice cracked as he called to her from the bottom of the stairs.
Jo had brought the large white envelope upstairs to her bedroom to open in privacy. But she’d forgotten to shut the door, so her solitude had ended before she could finish reading through the copy her lawyer had sent of her final, signed divorce papers.
“The taxi’s going to leave,” Alec hollered. “I’m getting in with or without you. I’ll call you from a pay phone when I get to the airport.”
If it had been any other day, when Jo’s divorce papers weren’t a glaring white rectangle on the new violet bedspread she’d bought after Liam moved out, she might have laughed at her son’s declaration.
“I’m coming.” Jo hoped the tremble didn’t sound in her voice. “I’m coming,” she whispered to herself as she slipped the papers into the envelope. She already knew what they said, and what did it matter, anyway?
Her fourteen-year marriage was officially over.
Today, she’d drop her son at the airport to spend the summer with his dad and Liam’s new fiancée in their new home in San Diego, where Alec would meet his new puppy...
New. New. New.
Jo didn’t like all this new.
And she didn’t really like her son flying so far on his own, but Alec had said he’d be fine. Liam said he’d be fine. So Jo had to live with it.
A soft snore came from the end of the bed. Speaking of old versus new. Jo had been left with the old dog—Sadie—and the old house. One hundred years old, to be exact. The house, not the dog.
When she’d first awakened this morning, hovering in the gray area between sleep and wakefulness, for several blessed seconds, she hadn’t remembered all the changes in her life. Then the ache in her heart began before her brain even comprehended the changes of the past four months and three days.
Jo blinked away the burning in her eyes as she heard the front door open, and Alec holler another threat as his suitcase made that clickety-clack sound across the porch.
“Happy birthday to me,” Jo whispered.
Sadie lifted her head for a moment, her sleepy eyes seeming to say, “Sorry you’re not having a good birthday.” But then her eyes slipped closed, and the snores started again. Sadie was ten, but she acted like she was fifty.
Releasing a sigh, Jo turned from the white envelope on the bed, and the sleeping dog, and left her bedroom. As she descended the stairs, she tried not to think of the hours and hours she and Liam had spent upgrading this one-hundred-year-old house. She loved everything about it, from the new banister, to the refinished hardwood floor, to the paint colors of Arctic Cotton and Misty Surf she’d chosen, to the chandelier she’d found at a swap meet hanging in the front entrance.
Jo grabbed her purse from the hall table, refinished only last summer when she was living a different life—a life she had no part of now. She walked through the open front door, and indeed, Alec was making good on his promise.
He had the trunk of the taxi open and was lifting his suitcase into it. His face had reddened, and his muscles strained. What in the world had he packed?
“Let me help you,” Jo called to him. She locked the front door, then hurried to help her son.
Surprisingly, he waited for her, instead of proceeding with his usual stubbornness to do everything himself.
Jo grasped one side of the suitcase and lifted, then groaned. “What did you put in this?”
Alec pushed up the black-framed glasses on his nose. The gesture was so like Liam that a pang shot through Jo. Alec also resembled Liam, with his sandy-brown hair and studious green eyes. Jo had first noticed Liam’s eyes when she met him in a faculty meeting at Seattle Central College.
“I want to show Dad my geode collection,” Alec said in that no-nonsense tone he’d perfected.
Of course, he does.Liam was a science teacher, and Alec’s interests were heading in that direction, too. “You know the weight limit is fifty pounds on the plane?”
“You can bring something heavier,” Alec informed her. “They put on a tag and charge extra. Mrs. Howard told me.”
Leave it to Alec to ask for advice from their world-traveling neighbor, Maggie Howard. Jo decided she was too tired to argue with her son about the wisdom of hauling rocks on a plane ride. “All right, lift on three.”
Once the suitcase was inside the trunk of the car, Jo said, “Don’t you want to say goodbye to Sadie?”
“I already did,” Alec said. “When you were in the shower.”
At least there was that. Alec was still loyal to his dog—a dog that Jo remembered finding with Liam. Another memory she’d have to stuff away. She rerouted herself back to the present and greeted the taxi driver, an older woman who had more colors in her hair than Jo could identify.
“There’s Mrs. Howard,” Alec said as they pulled onto the street.
Jo looked over to see their elderly neighbor out walking in her slow gait. Maggie Howard was a quiet woman, but she faithfully walked the neighborhood each day. The sight always inspired Jo to exercise herself—another goal she was determined to achieve this summer.
Jo and Alec waved as they passed the woman and Mrs. Howard waved back, her eyes as sharp as ever. The few times Jo had visited Maggie’s home, she had been impressed with the woman’s collection of art. Everything from seascapes to miniature portraits from sixteenth-century Europe decorated the woman’s walls.
Maggie’s husband had been an innovator of dental implants, and he’d traveled the world presenting at medical conferences. Maggie went along and collected art. A charmed life, if there ever was one, Jo decided.
The taxi continued out of the neighborhood, and the driver kept up a friendly and steady chatter with Alec as they drove to the Seattle airport.
Jo felt grateful for the driver’s distraction because the reality of Alec’s leaving was starting to settle in. She’d already determined not to cry at the airport—after Alec had made her promise, of course. Besides, having her son away for the summer would theoretically allow Jo plenty of time to work on that historical study about Mongol queens she’d started three years ago. The research had been fascinating, but with everyone home during the summers—Liam was on the same professor schedule—writing had always taken a back seat.
No more delays, Jo determined, trying not to feel the impact of the reason why she’d now finally have so much uninterrupted time. Alec would be gone, and her marriage was over.
“Which terminal?” the taxi driver asked.
Before Jo could answer, Alec did it for her.
As the driver pulled to the curb, the impact that Alec would really be leaving, and the time was now, made Jo’s eyes sting.
“You’re not going to cry, are you, Mom?” Alec said from the back seat.
Jo dragged in a breath. “Of course, not,” she said in a cheerful, albeit wobbly, tone. She was probably not even fooling the taxi driver. She popped open her door and told the driver, “Maybe you’ll be my return trip home.”
As it turned out, Jo reemerged from the airport an hour-and-a-half later, when she knew Alec’s plane had left the ground. After her tears had dried, she’d called Liam from a pay phone to let him know that the flight was on time, and only when he confirmed he’d be there to pick up Alec did she leave the terminal to find another taxi.
Jo would have driven, but her car was in the shop. Her second taxi driver of the day was a young man, twenty-something, who talked about his hobby of painting miniature board game creatures. Jo had never heard of such a thing and wanted to ask Liam about it. But then she remembered. She couldn’t ask Liam. Well, it would be very awkward if she did. It wasn’t like they were enemies, but they weren’t really friends, either. Not anymore.
“It’s not you, it’s me,” Liam had told her on that rainy day in early February. “Things have been off between us for a while. I don’t feel myself anymore, and you don’t deserve half a husband.”
Jo had wanted to ask him what he meant by “a while,” but she was too numb to ask those types of questions. He moved out the week before Valentine’s Day, and on Valentine’s night, while Jo was on her second bowl of ice cream, Alec had called her from Liam’s apartment, where he was spending the weekend, and asked her why Dad had taken another woman to dinner.
On Liam’s parenting weekend, he’d gone on a date and left Alec home alone. Jo had then known the truth about Liam’s leaving her.
When the taxi turned onto her street, Jo realized she’d tuned out whatever the driver had been speaking about in the last ten minutes. When he pulled into her driveway, she thanked him and paid, then climbed out.
Now, her summer was about to begin, and as she walked up the steps to her front door, she decided that today, she could review her manuscript pages. Then tomorrow, she’d go to the library to do research after she got her car out of the shop.
Since today was her birthday, she’d order pizza for dinner. Weren’t fortieth birthdays supposed to be a bigger deal than normal? She’d order the kind of pizza she liked, and not the kind she always ordered for Liam and Alec to make them happy. It wasn’t like she had a group of girlfriends to go out with. Any co-workers had been Liam’s friends to begin with. Jo had just been the wife. Besides, it was hard to pin down any of their colleagues in the summer.
Jo and Liam. Liam and Jo.They always got smiles about the combination of their names. Now, it was just Jo. And Liam and Krista.
Jo told herself she would be happy with the homemade card and hand-me-down Rubik’s Cube from Alec. It was sweet of him to give it to her. He had two others, but he’d said that his first was his favorite. And she couldn’t really expect a thirteen-year-old kid to go out and get her a gift on his own. That would have been what Liam and Alec did together.
When she unlocked the front door and stepped into the house, the empty quiet was like a blow to her stomach. She shut the door with a quiet click, then stood in the entryway and listened to the clock hanging above the bottom stairs ticking. She couldn’t remember the last time the house had been quiet enough to hear the ticking of a clock.
The memory of when she had bought the clock flashed through her mind. She and Liam had been at an antique store in downtown Seattle, and they’d browsed the store together, walking hand in hand. Jo had pulled Liam to a stop when she saw the clock—the Roman numerals against the mosaic background had practically yelled at her to take notice.
“Buy it,” Liam had said, squeezing her hand.
“I don’t dare look at the price,” Jo told him.
She held her breath as Liam reached for the hanging white tag and turned it over. “Three-hundred and fifty.”
Jo sighed. “Too much.”
Liam released her hand, grasped the clock with both hands, and took it down from its spot on the wall. “Happy anniversary, sweetheart.” He leaned close and kissed her.
Now, Jo closed her eyes. How long ago had that been? Five years? Six? She leaned against the front door, not wanting to walk farther into the house. Every item and every room would bring back another memory. Jo imagined herself by the end of the night lying on the floor, beneath the weight of too many memories. All of them had been tainted now.
Liam had fallen in love with another woman, and here Jo stood alone in the entryway of her beautiful home. Feeling as empty as the house.
When a knock sounded at the door, Jo startled.
Heart pounding, she swallowed back her surprise, then checked the peephole. Seconds later, Jo pulled the door open, a forced smile on her face, as she greeted her neighbor, Maggie Howard.