Chapter 3 #3
“Just these please,” she said to me, handing over the raincoats and sweater. I had a feeling she would probably buy the entire store if it meant she could leave faster.
I rang up her items, and the woman paid. As they left the store, I heard her turn on her son.
“Andy, do you really think that was appropriate—” And they disappeared from view.
By the time my shift was nearly over, I had almost finished taking stock.
“You all good, Emerson?”
I glanced up to see Jarrod, the store manager, hovering by the door.
“Yep, everything’s fine!” I chirped. Jarrod was nice, but he asked me if I was okay at least four times per shift. If you couldn’t actually kill someone with kindness, I was pretty sure you could make them nauseous with it.
“Okay, well, you can finish up early if you’d like. Darren got in early.”
He probably asked Darren to come in earlier just in case I couldn’t handle the full shift. Normally, that would have irritated me, but it was Thursday, which meant I’d be heading to Winnie’s house soon, where we’d drink tea and talk about the book we’d picked out for the week.
I handed Jarrod the stock list. “Thanks. I’ve done most of it already.”
He nodded. “You still okay for Saturday’s shift? It’ll be busy.”
“More than capable,” I said, a little too dryly.
Jarrod blushed. “Of course. Yeah, I know that. I’ll see you Saturday!”
A year ago, Winnie’s husband, Cliff, left her. After forty-something years together, he just disappeared while Winnie was at the supermarket. Wild. I thought Brady was the worst person on Earth, but my vote now went to Cliff (though Brady was still a close second).
When I joined the grief group, I didn’t expect anything to happen. I was only going to make Mom happy. But then Winnie sat down next to me, and she handed me a bright-red lipstick.
“What’s this for?”
“You’ve been fussing with your neck for ten minutes. Wear red. Everybody will be looking at the red, not your burns.”
This was the first time someone had acknowledged the elephant in the room.
I immediately found myself drawn to Winnie and, despite our nearly sixty-year age gap, she became my new best friend.
Imagine that: nineteen years old and my favorite person in the world was seventy-eight.
After work, I’d bike to her house. We’d hang out all the time, under the guise of our so-called book club (which, let’s be honest, was just the two of us).
We’d swap novels and poetry books, bird-watch from her back porch, and experiment with whatever new recipe she’d find in some decades-old magazine.
Somewhere along the way, I got her hooked on reality TV—Real Housewives, anyone?
Beverly Hills was her favorite. Given that Henry invited us to share poetry in our sessions, we also had plenty on our list: Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath.
Our favorite poet at the moment was B.W.
Paisley. Her work just felt so accessible.
Reading her words, you could tell she deeply felt the emotions that she’d written onto the page.
She was a real person, not some old dead white guy like John Keats or Percy Bysshe Shelley.
“How was work?” Winnie asked, as I plopped myself down on her couch and reached for the cookies she had already placed on the table.
“Fine, same old same old.”
I bit into the cookie, relishing its gooey chocolate center.
Being with Winnie was so comforting. She wasn’t your quintessential grandma.
She was small, with soft lavender-gray hair that was wavy and full of life, and wore half-moon glasses that always seemed slightly askew.
She baked like she owned her own patisserie, knitted like it was an Olympic sport, and cruised around town in a beat-up mustard-yellow Volkswagen Beetle.
She also had the cutest tees, colorful scarves, and to-die-for boots.
She attended the Sonic Bloom Festival in Denver every year without fail, played video games like a pro, and had the energy of someone born thirty years later than she actually was.
“What’s on the agenda for today?” she asked.
“Whatever you like! We can either watch a movie, or we can read some poetry?”
What I liked most about reading poetry with Winnie was that she’d always relate the poem to a story about her life, and I loved listening to her wild tales about former lovers and the time she met The Rolling Stones and Madonna in one night.
And yes, all of her adventures with Cliff too.
I knew that she was devastated about him, but I think it helped her to share, so I always listened.
She was halfway through telling me about the first time she and Cliff went to New York City when my phone rang. Mom.
“Hey, I’m just at Winnie’s—we’re doing our Thursday book club thing.”
“Oh, that’s okay, honey, but I need you to come pick me up.”
I looked over at Winnie, slightly panicked.
What is it? she mouthed.
“Um, I can’t, we’re just in the middle of a really important chapter,” I stammered.
“What?” Mom and Winnie said simultaneously.
“Emerson. My car broke down, I’m just past Highland Street. I need you to get in your brother’s car and pick me up.” Her sentences were getting choppy, which meant she was already irritated.
“I can’t,” I said.
“What do you mean you can’t?”
“Because—”
“Emerson Marie Coleman.” She drew my name out in a dangerously quiet voice. Yikes. “You will come pick your mother up, right now!”
I knew when I was defeated.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I really can’t, I don’t have Sebastian’s car.”
“What do you mean you don’t have the car?”
I sighed. “I lied. I rode my bike here. And I didn’t drive the car home the other night after group, either; Winnie did.”
She was silent. Silence is the worst because it holds both the blessing and catastrophe of the unknown, and you have no idea what you’ll get stuck with. I would rather she started yelling.
“You need to get in the car and come get me. I’m stranded on the side of the road, Emerson,” she said finally.
“I can’t.”
“Emerson, this has gone on for too long, you hear me? Enough of this. You need to get over this fear.”
“You don’t understand!” I said, anger bursting out of my chest. “You’ll never understand what this feels like!” I hung up the phone, jumped up from the sofa, where only moments before I’d been happily nestled, and rushed out, furious tears escaping despite my best efforts.
“Emmy, wait!” Winnie called after me. I knew she’d heard the entire conversation, but I didn’t turn back. She couldn’t help me. I jumped on my bike and pedaled away.
When I did a salto on the balance beam, it felt like I was flying.
Now it felt as if my life was split between the two sides of the beam.
On one side was the life I had before, with perfect skin and a triple-twisting double layout that would drive a crowd wild.
On the other was the life I had now. I was barely holding on to either.
I rode for at least twenty minutes, but instead of going back home, I found myself at the library.
The library was open late. I first discovered this when I’d had a panic attack some months ago and needed a temporary refuge.
It was quiet, it was safe, it was somewhere I could just be—thoughts of gymnastics, my accident, even my skin, put aside while I immersed myself in a book.
I parked my bike near the entryway, fitting it neatly into the bike rack, and went inside, making my way to the poetry section.
I’d always hated poetry in school. I couldn’t understand why we needed to write an essay about a door being blue and how that meant the poet was suffering from depression.
Sometimes a door is just blue, you know?
But Henry introduced me to a new kind of poetry.
Maybe in exchange for all the crap life had given me, the universe gifted me with these books, because when I read them they made me feel seen.
And, despite all the moments I spent curled up in a ball avoiding the mirror, they never made me feel ugly.
I trailed my fingers across the poetry shelf, not stopping until I found what I was looking for. I pulled out a book and found a secluded spot to sit down but hadn’t even made it ten pages in when I read something that hit every nerve in my entire body.
On all the days
you can’t bring yourself
to look into a mirror.
On all the nights the tears
stream like a river—
I hope someone reminds you
that the life you have is worth living.
I hope they listen to your fears
and reservations in the way
they listen to your dreams
and aspirations: with purpose.
with a knowing that they are
equally as important.
I hope you cut the strings tying
you to the person you used to be;
they are not there anymore.
long gone, but you are more beautiful
than you were before.
Because you have carried on;
despite the world telling you not to.
you have risen for a new dawn.
“Emerson?”
I hurriedly wiped away my tears.
“Oh, hi, Henry. Um, sorry, are you closing up now?”
He checked his watch.
“Still have another hour or so. Doesn’t look very comfortable down there.”
“The readers’ corner is out of action,” I said, and he grinned, rolling his eyes.
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He studied my face, his grin fading. “Are you okay?”
I shrugged. “Had a fight with my mom.”
“Ah. That can happen with moms.”
“She just doesn’t understand what it’s like. You know? She doesn’t get it.”
Henry knelt down beside me, resting his elbows on his knees.
“I felt like my mom didn’t understand either.
I was pretty callous about it—I really thought I was the only one in the world dealing with Jacob’s death.
Like my grief somehow held more weight, more anguish.
I barely spoke to her. I shut her out because I thought she couldn’t possibly understand what I was feeling.
And in doing that, I think I made her feel like she’d lost me too.
She was already mourning one son, and I made her feel like she was mourning another. ”
“My mom hasn’t lost me, though. She just doesn’t see me anymore.”
“Well, maybe that’s how my mother felt about me. Maybe she felt like she had failed because she couldn’t take on my grief in addition to her own,” he replied gently.
“Maybe,” I conceded reluctantly. “It’s just—it’s always been my mom, my brother Sebastian, and me.
My dad left when I was little, and ever since then, it’s been the three of us against the world.
And now it’s like, ever since the accident, she doesn’t even look at me the same way.
I don’t know if she’s disappointed or just tired of me. ”
Henry’s expression softened. “I’m sorry. It’s hard when you feel like the person who’s always been there suddenly doesn’t get you.”
I hugged my knees. “I just hate fighting with her.”
He gestured to the book in my lap. “What are you reading?”
I turned the cover over. “It’s another book by B.W. Paisley. This one is called Hope for Tomorrow.”
“Poetry?”
I nodded.
“She writes about loss in the way that I feel it. She understands.”
“The beauty of poetry is that it can evoke feelings like that sometimes. Perhaps you could read this out next week?”
“At the meeting?”
He nodded. “If this poet is important to you, I’m sure the group would love to hear her words as well.”
“I don’t know. What if the others hate it, and it makes them feel worse?”
Henry rose to his feet. “You know, I started the group specifically because of poetry. I read a poem and it was the only thing at the time that got me back up off this exact floor. I think if you’ve found a book that does the same for you, then you should share it with others who may need it too.”
I nodded distantly, watching him as he moved back toward the counter to serve someone.
Henry’s words lingered, but so did my doubts.
Sharing wasn’t just about reading lines on a page—it meant opening up, even just a little; something that I was trying so hard to do more of, but still found so difficult.
I stared down at the book in my lap, brushing my thumb over the embossed title.
Hope for Tomorrow. The irony wasn’t lost on me.
I’d spent so much time lately thinking about what my life had been like before the accident.
The certainty I felt each day. My body had been a finely tuned machine then, every movement deliberate, and I knew what I wanted from my future.
But could there really be hope for tomorrow when that future had changed so drastically?
My coach said moving forward would be just like riding a bike.
That I would be able to drive again, perform again, feel comfortable enough to get back into the life that I’d once had.
But I wasn’t getting back onto the same bike.
This bike had different gears, different speeds—I was wobbling.
I missed how it felt to fly, but I knew that I would be safer on the ground.