ChapterFive
J.J. had to check in with her brother, wayward sons, and real estate agent. She also wanted to connect with the rest of the Sandbar Sisters. But after the travel, a walkthrough of the house, and realizing that there was still a decent amount of work to do to get it empty, she was feeling tired. The task she had ahead might be overwhelming.
Her confidence in Libby might have been premature.
Part of her worried that she shouldn’t have sold the house. If she let the place sit here, she wouldn’t be forced to do a thing with it.
Except she wasn’t a dummy, and Dean would have scolded her, too, on this. The market was hot in Irish Hills. She could get three times what they paid for it if she sold it now. She’d seen a lot of ups and downs in Michigan, enough to know to strike while the iron was hot.
The insurance from Dean and the cash from the house would provide some money to give her time to decide what she wanted to do when she grew up.
She locked up the house and pocketed a list of things she needed both for cleanup and to take over to Nora House.
J.J. decided a trip to the new grocery store would be the way to wrap up her day. It was all she could manage. The trip from Florida was one thing. The trip down memory lane was the real reason she felt exhausted.
J.J. knew she had to deal with D.J., but, in the words of Scarlett O’Hara, she’d think about that tomorrow.
Again, her old station wagon started on the first try. What do you know about that?Dean, all the way, again.He’d gotten the oil changes, the fluid checks, and the millions of little maintenance details that kept the thing running.
She drove over to Barton’s Food Village, or what used to be Barton’s, and was amazed at the number of cars in the parking lot.
The sleepy village of Irish Hills was wide awake, even in May, which was traditionally too early for the “season.”
After she parked, she looked up at the new Irish Hills Village Market sign.
Sometimes, J.J. felt like the only one who’d lost something during the tornado. It was selfish. She knew it was. The truth was that Ned Barton, Shelly’s salon, and all the work that had gone into downtown had been blown away; everyone was touched when tragedy hit a small town. Seeing the new building, so different from what was here before, reminded J.J. that the winds blew apart more lives than just hers. It helped her stop feeling so sorry for herself.
In the wake of Dean’s death, she’d had to get away and process things her way. Being back, though, she wondered if she’d delayed actually processing her grief.Was it wrong to have left?Other people did it all the time. But maybe she had only avoided the pain or dodged a bullet. Well, shethoughtshe had done that. Dodged it. But she had not. This grief wasn’t a bullet to be dodged. It was a heat-seeking missile.
J.J. looked up at the gorgeous new grocery store that had replaced the old, rickety Barton’s Food Village.
Ned was dead, the old store gone. This wasn’t just her loss. She had shopped in this spot hundreds, thousands of times. As a young mom, she’d pushed a cart with Austin in a baby carrier and D.J. in the basket. Ned Barton wasn’t one to buy the fancy racecar-shaped grocery carts.
She remembered D.J. sweetly sitting there as she handed him groceries. He’d arrange the stuff around his perch in the corner of the cart.
Back in those days, they were trying to spend sixty dollars a week on groceries. She remembered debates, to put it mildly, with Dean about how she chose to stretch those sixty bucks.
“What is this? Windex? Toilet bowl cleaner? This is supposed to be a grocery trip.”
“Uh, yeah, thosearegroceries.”
She’d unload the bags, and Dean would pace around, wounded, as he observed her grocery selections.
“These are cleaning products. You can’teatcleaning products for dinner.”
“Well, keep that attitude up, and you’ll get a thermos of glass cleaner in your lunch box.” She smiled and ignored Dean’s critique. “And you can go next week and take the kids.”
She’d thought Dean would balk at that, but he hadn’t. He’d gone the next week and learned all about the challenges of a shoestring budget and shopping with two babies.
“By the time I got the diapers and formula, I’d used seventy-five percent of our budget.”
“You don’t say?”
“You win. You’re way better than I am at this.”
And that was the last time she heard a complaint about her grocery haul. Well, sometimes she caught heck for generic peanut butter, but she could take it.
Those days seemed so hectic, sometimes even a blur. Now, though, before she walked into the fancy new grocery store, she knew she missed those shoestring budget days. She could almost see her two sweet but gigantic sons holding her groceries as the three of them navigated through the aisles.
