EPILOGUE
“When we werein high school, did ninth graders get a prom?” Sam asked, his tone somewhere between genuine curiosity and complaint. “Because I don’t remember that.”
Maggie took the flower stems out of her mouth to answer. “It’s not a prom, it’s a Freshman Formal.”
“It’s looking suspiciously like a prom to me.”
Maggie laughed. “Just relax and let her enjoy it. You’ve got her for one more summer, and then she’s off to Sweden for her exchange year. Hand me those scissors.”
“The little ones or the big ones?”
“Little ones. The big ones are shears.”
Sam snorted, but handed her the smaller scissors.
They were on the back porch of Sam’s house, which Maggie had moved into a couple of months ago on a trial basis. So far, it was working out smoothly. She loved the house, a detached two-bedroom residence with a well-kept lawn and a pleasant backyard in a nice neighborhood. In the course of her life, Maggie had lived in fine upscale condos and run-down apartments, but she had never been anywhere quite like this, an archetypical family home such as the kind where sitcom families lived on TV.
The flowers were something she was exploring as a possible home business idea. Maggie was still feeling out the shape of her future life. Although she felt that she had her magpie tentatively under control, she didn’t want a career that came with shiny temptations. Flowers seemed like they had the possibility of satisfying her love for beautiful things without drawing her toward anything unreasonably valuable. She had taken a flower arranging course online, and now she was doing the floral arrangements for Charlie’s freshman dance.
“Sweden,” Sam remarked, picking up a flower to twiddle it between his fingers. The air was full of the scents and sounds of a late spring evening: fresh-cut lawns and fragrance from flowering trees, kids yelling in play, barbecue smoke, and of course the perfume of the flowers covering the folding table that Maggie had set up on the back porch.
“Sweden.”
“I can’t believe my little girl is going to be half a world away next fall.”
“I’m happy the program accepted her at the last minute. She’s going to have a great time. She’ll learn to speak Swedish, she’ll make new friends, and she’ll come back bursting with things to tell you about.”
“If she comes back at all,” Sam said, apparently determined to shed empty-nest gloom all over the pleasant evening. “Do you get the idea she has some kind of long-distance dating thing going with one of those Swedish kids?”
“Ask her, not me,” Maggie said, clipping the twine tying the stems together.
“I did. She said, ‘Stop sayingdating, Dad, you’re so stuck in the 90s. It’s a situationship.’”
Maggie stifled her smile. “I think that’s a yes, but they’re also very young, and you know how things are at that age. Relax.”
She did in fact know for sure, because Charlie had come to her a few weeks ago to confess that she thought she might have a crush on one of the Swedish girls from the ski group (“I think I like girls, Maggie!”). But Maggie was quite serious in her promise of secrecy, provided there was nothing illicit or dangerous going on.
Evidently Charlie was not quite ready to talk to her dad about her teen crushes, which Maggie thought was prudent of her. If Sam was having this much trouble with his daughter doing an exchange year in Sweden, it probably wasn’t the time to drop the possibility of a Swedish moose daughter-in-law on him either.
But then again, from her own experience, Maggie knew that teen crushes tended to be intense, memorable, and temporary. At this point, there was just as much chance that Charlie would end up settling down with a possum shifter from Louisiana or an Australian wombat.
“Stop trying to over-plan your daughter’s life and just let it happen,” Maggie advised as she switched to the next centerpiece. Her magpie was content, soothed by the wealth of color and texture passing through her fingers. “She’s growing up. She’ll do what we did, make mistakes and see new things, fall in love and fall out of love, and maybe, if she’s lucky, find her true mate someday.”
This finally managed to tease Sam out of his dark mood. He brushed a finger across the back of Maggie’s sap-stained hand. “Luck, is it?”
“A big helping of it, I’d say.”
“Maybe we were called to the place we needed to be.”
They had never had anything happen again like the strange connection Sam claimed he had felt during the storm, pulling him to Maggie and Charlie through a whiteout blizzard. Maggie wasn’t sure what she believed had really happened. Maybe forsomeone as logical and rational as Sam, tuning into his intuitive side for once hadfeltlike telepathy.
Or maybe there really was a connection there. She couldn’t deny that they had already started finishing each other’s sentences, and people were asking how long they’d been married and couldn’t believe they had only been dating for a few months.
When you found the right person, sometimes you just knew.
She had spent her life following her instincts to all the wrong places. It was strange to have them lead her somewhere good for once.
“I heard Cara is working full-time for the lodge now,” Sam remarked. “You know, the unicorn girl?”
