to take a leave of absence. Take a couple of months off.”
“What? Now? I can’t leave now.” A burning sob grabbed Sarah by the throat. Without her work, she would be nothing. Without a project to wrestle with the grief she felt every waking minute of the day, she knew beyond a doubt she would go insane. She was at Charmaine’s mercy more than she’d realized. She couldn’t imagine not coming to this office every morning and seeing the rest of the staff. The idea was ludicrous. She wanted this job. She needed her work. “You don’t understand, Charmaine.”
“Yes, I do,” Charmaine said softly. “I’m not firing you. On the contrary. I think you have more talent than anyone I’ve ever met. Given a bit more flair, you could be me.” Charmaine tried to laugh, but Sarah’s face was stone.
“Okay,” Charmaine continued. “Let me tell you a story. A long time ago, I was lost. Truly lost. I had no one. My family had turned their backs on me. I’d lost the one person I thought I loved, but he didn’t love me back. I lost my job in Chicago and I thought the world had come to an end. Then I spent a month—maybe more than a month—walking the beach here at Indian Lake. I stood on the shore of Lake Michigan at the beach in New Buffalo and looked across at the Chicago skyline and asked myself what I wanted. Not what my parents wanted for me, which was to live in a mansion on the North Shore and join the Yacht Club and the Sheridan Golf Club. They wanted me to marry an heir to an even bigger fortune than theirs. But I would have been miserable. That’s when I decided to pursue my design business right here in this little town. I didn’t know anyone except old Hop at the Phillips gas station, who filled my red Mustang tank every Saturday morning. I had to start over. I had to make my own life. And I’ve never regretted it.”
“And you think that’s what I need to do? Maybe move away from here?”
“I think you need to decide a lot of things, and that’s one of them. No one can go anywhere around here and not see your mother’s stamp. Heck, it’s her red velvet cake recipe that Maddie Strong uses at her cupcake shop, for heaven’s sake.”
“I forgot that.”
“See what I mean?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sarah. These are big shoes to fill, and you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. You could...”
“Go back to Indianapolis?”
“Well...” Charmaine shrugged. “You were well on your way to an excellent future with Harper Architectural Design when you came here. Maybe you would be happier in a big city.” Charmaine touched her gold Cross pen. “Maybe you’re only grieving right now. Maybe that’s all it is. But I want you to have the opportunity that I had, Sarah. I want to give you the time you need to discover yourself.”
“Myself,” Sarah repeated, wondering what that meant, exactly.
“You are your own self. Not Ann Marie. Not Paul Jensen. Not even your Aunt Emily. You are you.”
Sarah felt a pang a grief shoot through her and it terrified her. “Can I come by and see you? I mean...just to talk?”
“Of course, my dear. I’m not abandoning you. I promise. I just think you need this...time.”
Sarah steadied her eyes on her boss. “But you don’t want me to work...on this?” Sarah pointed at her drawings.
“No. I’m giving it to Susie. She’ll take over.”
A knife whipped across the universe from some dark, wicked place and cut a deep, permanent slit in Sarah’s heart. “I see.”
Charmaine’s eyes were intractable and purposeful.
Sarah knew instantly that the conversation was over, so she placed a smile on her lips and rose from the chair. “Thank you, Charmaine. I appreciate your candor and...support.” Sarah held out her hand for her boss to shake.
Charmaine did not leave her chair as she held out her hand and shook Sarah’s firmly. “You’re welcome.”
Sarah left the room and did not realize how great her shock was until long after she had gathered her purse and belongings from her desk, gone to her car and turned on the engine. She drove out of the parking lot and got as far as the county courthouse, where she looked at the clock tower and saw that it was not even ten in the morning.
She pulled her car into an empty parking lot across from the Book Nook and Java Stop. Her hands were shaking as she turned off the engine and covered her face. She cried into her hands so that they could keep her sobs from escaping the car.
What will I do for the rest of the day?
She looked at the clock tower and saw the minute hand advance a single notch.
What will I do with the rest of my life?
CHAPTER FOUR
SARAH TURNED THE hundred-year-old doorbell crank in the middle of Mrs. Beabots’s heavy wooden door, making an odd, sour, tinny sound. Sarah remembered this particular bell being one of her favorite sounds when she was little. Back then, Mrs. Beabots always baked fresh peanut butter cookies for her. The second the cookies were out of the oven, Mrs. Beabots would call her mother and ask her to send Sarah over immediately to enjoy the warm cookies with the cold milk she had delivered to her front door. Sarah had many memories of Mrs. Beabots, and they were all good.
“Is that you, pumpkin?” Mrs. Beabots asked as she slowly approached the front door, peeking through a smooth section of leaded and beveled glass in an intricate Victorian pattern.
“It’s me,” Sarah answered. “Are you ready?”
The door swung open with a bit more force and movement than Sarah would have expected.
“I am. I don’t like to keep Father Michael waiting on my account.”
Sarah bit her lip to keep from smiling. She knew that their priest was a real stickler for starting Sunday services on time. He didn’t wait for anyone.
“Oh,” Mrs. Beabots said and stuck her arthritic forefinger in the air. “My pocketbook.” She turned around and walked over to a marble-topped Victorian entry table where she’d left her purse next to a tall crystal vase filled with white and purple lilacs. The flowers’ scent wafted over to Sarah.
“Your lilacs are marvelously fragrant this year, Mrs. Beabots.”
“Cow pucky.” Mrs. Beabots smiled as she exited the house and locked the front door behind her. “Got it from Angelo Barzonni. He’s got plenty on his farm. Manure always makes flowers more fragrant.”
“You hate to drive. Please tell me you did not drive out to the Barzonnis’.”
Mrs. Beabots took Sarah’s arm with her left hand and held on to the black, wrought-iron railing on her cement steps with her right. “Good heavens, Sarah, I wouldn’t do that. Angelo had one of the boys deliver it.”
Sarah exhaled and dismissed the frightening vision of her less-than-five-foot-tall neighbor behind the wheel of her old Cadillac. It was easily the size of a U.S. Navy destroyer. “The next time you need something like that, I’ll be more than happy to pick it up for you.”
“Oh, you have enough to do, what with your job and all. I see how late your lights are burning, and I know you’re working. Aren’t you?”
Not anymore, Sarah thought, but didn’t want to get into the subject of her forced unemployment. This was Sunday, and she wanted to enjoy the sunshine and the beautiful day. “And just how would you know how late I’m up, if you’re sound asleep like you should be?”
A warm gust shot across their path as they walked north on Maple Avenue toward St. Mark’s. Mrs. Beabots reached up to hold her black straw hat on her blue-rinsed white hair. “I should have used my hat pin,” she mumbled.
Sarah chuckled to herself. No one on earth still used a hat pin but Mrs. Beabots.