Chapter 5 #2
He shook his head. “I don’t hate the idea, Henry. I think it’s admirable you want to support the group. I just wonder if you’re taking too much on.”
“I’m not sure I understand. I’ve got time to do it, so why shouldn’t I?”
“Well, I just wonder if you’re compensating for the pain of losing Jacob? Maybe you don’t realize it, but you might be trying to fix something you couldn’t fix with him…”
I opened my mouth to argue, but his steady knowing look stopped me. It was the kind of look that had pulled me out of countless spirals before, a mix of understanding and brutal honestly. Max could read me like a book.
“It’s okay to care,” Max continued, gently, “but it isn’t your job to fix everything.”
“I know that,” I replied. “But look at all the progress everyone’s made since we started meeting. These group sessions, they’ve been a lifeline for all of us. If we don’t keep finding ways to connect, I’m worried we’ll lose that momentum.”
Max set his coffee down carefully, tilting his head. “I think the sessions have been going well just as they are. Do you think we really need a poetry evening as well?”
I thought about the cost to run the sessions.
I nodded. “Yes, I do. Grief is isolating. But the evening would be a way to remind everyone it doesn’t have to be. It can bring us closer, help us see the positive in sharing those experiences.”
He leaned back, considering. “I think you’re right that connection is key. Vulnerability takes courage, though, and not everyone will feel ready to share on such a public stage. You need to be mindful about that.”
“Absolutely,” I agreed, smiling brightly. “Will you help me introduce the idea to them?”
Max raised an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth twitching in amusement. “And when exactly are you planning to spring this on them?”
“This Tuesday,” I said quickly, almost sheepishly.
He cleared his throat, his eyebrows climbing higher. “So, in two days?”
I shrugged. “No time like the present.”
He opened his mouth to reply but closed it again as my order was called from the front of the café. I stood to retrieve it.
“We’ll try, Henry,” Max said. “Don’t take it personally if not everyone’s ready.”
I nodded. Not everyone might be ready, but I wasn’t just doing this for the group’s progress.
It was about keeping the group alive. The poetry evening wasn’t just a chance to share; it would be a way to raise the funds we needed to continue the sessions, and maybe to expand.
I wasn’t ready to let go of what we’d built together.
Sometimes grief makes you feel helpless, but this—this was something I could do.
That afternoon, I busied myself with refilling staplers, restocking the books that had been returned to the book bin, no surprise that I also found a sweater in there with a sticky note that read “accidentally took home,” and I made a mental note to visit the thrift store, since we’d be needing a new rug for the reading corner.
As I was in the middle of choosing between budget planning or writing a very enthusiastic email to the board about the poetry evening idea, the bell rang and I saw the woman from Brandy’s—Wren?
—walk in through the front doors. She stopped momentarily at the secondhand book display, looking at the titles, before she wandered across the floor to the aisles.
She carried herself the same way so many of us in the grief group did; her step was a little slower, her eyes a little glassy, her smile hidden in the corner of her mouth.
Wren reemerged eventually at the front counter, just as I was wrestling the last of the staples into the magazine.
“Hi there,” she said.
“Hi,” I replied. “Welcome to Everston Library.”
“Henry, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I smiled. “Wren?”
She nodded. “Sorry for just taking off the other night at Brandy’s. It was getting late, and truthfully, I’d had a few glasses of wine. I didn’t want to lose my way back home.”
I straightened my glasses. “Oh, don’t even worry about that.”
“I was hoping to borrow a book.”
“Well, you’ll need a library card first,” I replied, and I bent down, finding the application form and sliding it across the counter. “Just fill out your details for me.”
She nodded, and picked up a pen from the holder near my computer.
As she started writing, I said, “So, what brought you to Everston?”
“Well, I thought I might end up back home,” she replied. “I’m originally from Montana, but my family moved to New York when I was seventeen, and I suppose I needed a quieter pace. I stumbled upon Everston, if I’m honest.”
“Everston has a way of finding people who aren’t looking for it,” I said.
She paused in her writing. “Have you always lived here?”
“Oh yes,” I smiled. “I’ve lived in Everston my whole life, can’t imagine going anywhere else.”
“It is a quaint place,” she said, handing me back the form.
“I just need your ID too,” I said, and she paused.
“I’m sorry, Henry, I must have forgotten my wallet.”
I shrugged with indifference. “Not to worry, we can let it slide this once.”
“I’m always forgetting things lately,” she murmured. “It’s like I can’t seem to remember the most basic of things.”
“Grief can do that sometimes.”
Her smile faded and I wondered if I had been a little too direct.
“I’m sorry,” I said apologetically, hoping I hadn’t overstepped. “You mentioned your fiancée the other night, and—” I gestured at the book she was holding, titled Grief and How We Survive It, “—that’s also a little bit of a giveaway.”
Wren laughed wryly. “I thought I’d be better at this by now,” she said. “She died sixteen months ago, in a car accident. But it still feels like yesterday.”
“Time never seems to line up with loss,” I replied.
“I still see her sometimes,” she said. “As though she is right in front of me.” She blushed, and took a deep breath, as though surprised by her own candidness. “I haven’t admitted that to anyone.”
I began to copy her information into the computer so I could print a new card.
“My twin brother, Jacob,” I said gently, “he died two years ago. Pancreatic cancer. I was still talking to him up until late last year, about three months before I started the grief group. I would have entire conversations with him in the middle of the grocery store.”
Wren’s eyes brightened. “I drink wine with Lucy and talk about the state of the house I’m living in.”
“We’re open to newcomers,” I said. “The grief group I mean. Why don’t you stop by?”
The printer whirred and popped out Wren’s new library card, so I scanned the book she passed me into the system before handing it back to her.
“You meet at Brandy’s?”
“Normally we meet in the reading corner here in the library,” I said. “But we’ve had a slight plumbing issue, so until next week we’re meeting at Brandy’s again. On Tuesday night.”
“I see.”
“Kyle, our local plumber, has been quite busy of late.”
She blushed momentarily. “That might be my fault,” she said. “I’m renovating the old house off Ducks Crossing Road. The plumbing there has been a nightmare.”
“Gill’s place!” I exclaimed. “So you’re the New Yorker up to your arms in sawdust and weeds.”
“Word travels fast,” she replied, with a smile.
There was a small commotion near the science fiction aisle as two teenagers knocked over a stack of books sitting on the library cart.
“Maybe I will see you Tuesday, Henry,” Wren said, and she walked away, the book tucked under her arm.
I can work with this, I thought as I made my way over to the spilled books. A maybe is always the first step.