to get away urgently. Manu left her for the girl next door. Can you imagine?” I said. “They’re parading around in front of her, it’s just too horrible to comprehend.” The girls knew all about Sophie, I’d drop her into conversation regularly. To us, her life was exotic and utterly glamorous – a world away from our sleepy town.
“Oh what a pig he is.” Missy said, frowning. “Does Sophie know how small this place is, though?” she asked carefully. “I mean…swapping Paris for Ashford? We love it here, but will she?” In the background the fire crackled and spat, a comforting familiar soundtrack to so many of our conversations.
I toyed with the handle on my mug. “She knows all about Ashford. Her only stipulation was that there weren’t a host of single men lining the streets looking for ‘The One’.”
Our peals of laughter rang out. “Well then,” CeeCee said, her brown face crinkling into a smile. “She’s picked the right town. Single men so sparse around here, it’s a wonder babies are still bein’ made.”
I giggled. While it was such a cliché, a small town with no single men, it was true for Ashford. The younger folk usually moved away to attend college or get jobs in bigger cities, and work here was hard to find. Each year the town population shrank.
Missy put her mug on the coffee table and stood. “I’m going to pretend you’re just going away for the weekend…”
I tried to laugh it off, but it sounded hollow. It would be the toughest thing ever to leave my friends, they were like my security blanket, but the excitement of finally visiting the city I’d coveted for so long brought a fresh wave of butterflies. My eyes flicked to Lil’s belly, as she put a hand to the sofa to ease her way upright. “Lil…” my voice fell away.
“What?” she said, searching my face. “Oh,” seeing the direction of my gaze she looked down at her belly. “Don’t you go getting sad on account of the jellybean…we’ll be Skyping you every other day,” her voice wobbled.
I stepped towards her and placed a hand on the bump, and was rewarded with a little kick. “See?” Lil said. “That’s the jellybean saying it’s OK to go!”
I kept silent, not trusting myself to speak without crying. I’d miss the jellybean’s birth, Lil and Damon’s first wedding anniversary, and baby Angel’s first birthday. Celebrations that meant a lot to me.
***
“Mom, seriously, it’s only Paris. I’m not trekking up the Himalayas, or base jumping in the Grand Canyon. I’m going to another bookshop. I’ll sip French wine, and eat macarons in every color of the rainbow. Wander down avenues where Edith Piaf once sang. I’ll meander around the flea markets near the 18th arrondissement…” I’d grabbed every French travel guide in the bookshop, and soaked up the text, my heart hammering with all the beauty I’d find.
“But, darling. You’ll be all alone. All by yourself.”
“I get it, Mom. You don’t need to emphasize it.” It was hard to listen to the doubt in her voice. She acted as if I wasn’t capable of traveling on my own, like I’d come home dead or something. “I’m sure I’ll make friends, and Ridge can meet me there. And so what if I’m alone? I’ll have more time to see what I want to see.”
“Sarah, it’s a jungle out there. I’m only telling you so you know. Anything can happen to you. You’re not the kind of girl who waltzes off into the sunset…”
A jungle out there. Like I’d get swallowed up whole. “What if you go back to that dark place again, Sarah? You’re doing great here. You’ve got the best group of friends, a busy life…”
“Mom, my life is the opposite of busy. It’s practically on standstill. I’m not going backwards, I’m going forwards. This will surely spur me on. I’m not seven anymore. All that’s in the past, well in the past.”
She clucked her tongue the way mom’s do. “I don’t want you retreating again, that’s all.”
“I won’t. Don’t you see? This is a huge step forward for me. No one can accuse me of living in the shadows if I go to Paris.” When I was seven, we went to a trade fair on the outskirts of Ashford, and somehow or other, I wandered off and got lost. I’d taken a walk into the nearby woods, and had gone too far. When darkness descended I’d felt real ice cold fear that I’d die out there, being seven, every noise was amplified, every shadow a predator. A whole team of people with torches searched for me. They didn’t find me until close to midnight. After that, nightmares plagued me, and I was scared to leave my parents’. A side effect was developing a nervous stutter, and as you can imagine school life became impossible. Kids mimicked me, and teased me until one day I faded away, and dived into the world of fiction.
Books had been my only friends. My confidence had taken the almightiest of hits, and had never really recovered. That girl, the one who wanted to die of embarrassment was sometimes just under the surface. Years of speech therapy fixed my stutter, and by the time I was a teen I’d learned to be invisible. I didn’t socialize, and didn’t have the first clue how to change that. Once you’ve cut yourself off from people, it’s so hard to find a way back in. My mom was certain I had developed depression, or agoraphobia, or a host of other medical conditions but it was fear, and the effects of bullying that left such a scar on my psyche. But that changed when I opened my bookshop, and Missy stepped into my life, and brightened it. Really that was a million years ago, and the friendship with the girls, and falling in love had boosted my self-confidence.
Mom sat across from me, the chipped and faded Formica table between us. Nothing in Mom’s kitchen had changed since I was a little girl. The spice rack was the same, the shelf displaying fancy plates still gathered dust, just like always. The silver kettle, dented, a boil-on-stove type, sat rotund, waiting. It didn’t take a genius to see who I took after, change wasn’t in either of our vocabs, yet here I was.
“Mom, my books have taken me around the world, but it’s time I stepped from the pages, so I can see it for myself.” I clasped my hands and leaned my elbows on the table. “It’s a few months, and then I’ll be safely home, and I’m sure I can pick up exactly where I left off because nothing ever changes around here.”
Dad was out back in the apple orchard, having given me a bear hug and his blessing. He was a man of few words, but his actions always showed me he cared. Mom’s black hair was streaked with more gray these days, and real fear was reflected in her eyes. She wrung her hands, a frown appearing, as if I’d told her I was going off to war.
“I just don’t know how you’ll cope.” Her lip wobbled. She was worried, her only child heading off into the sunset.
My parents were salt of the earth types. The only time they traveled was to sell the apples that grew abundantly out back. They worked hard, read a lot, and were quiet church going folk, who lived softly in this world.
“Mom, I’ll be fine. It’s time I tried something new, that’s all.”
She shook her head, miffed. My mom was a lot like me with the if it’s not broke don’t fix it kind of mentality, so I knew she thought traveling was something frivolous, a folly. And dangerous to boot.
“What if something happens to you?”
“I hope it does, Mom. I hope I come back with a new vigor for life. I’m tired of being the same person, half-living, all this waiting for something to happen…I have to make it
