1
Anne
April 2022
“Name?” The barista’s marker poisedabove the cup.
“Anne. With ane,” I added.
I waited for the answering glimmer that would identify the girl at the airport coffee shop as a kindred spirit. Any sort of recognition, I told myself, would be a sign. A connection, like a message from my dad.
When I was eight, my father brought a copy ofAnne of Green Gableshome from the library’s used-book sale. I’d been sick for a week, some kind of flu that left me confined to the house, antsy and bored. My easygoing father was useless in the sickroom, my mother said. (Uselessness, in her eyes, was a sin, like greed or envy or forgetting to take off your shoes in the house.) He’d stood there awkwardly in the door of my small room, his big carpenter’s hand wrapped around a battered green paperback with a red-haired girl on the cover, and I’d been overwhelmed with love.
He was not a reader, my dad. But somehow he’d understood (or been told by my English teacher, Mrs.Powell) that I neededAnne Shirley in my life. She became my fictional best friend, my inspiration, reassurance that a strange girl with a big imagination and a bigger mouth could find her place in the world.
Of course, I could never truly be Anne. I wasn’t Canadian, for one thing. Or a natural redhead. Or an orphan. But as soon as I turned eighteen, I had an Anne Shirley quote tattooed on my right arm, paid for with savings from working in my mother’s fudge shop over the summer:Tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet.
“Looks like a mistake to me,” my mother said when I’d proudly revealed my new ink.
The barista scrawled on the cup. “Anything else?”
Her voice broke into my memories. I blinked, abruptly recalled to the present. Around us, the terminal rang with footsteps, rattling wheels, and echoing flight announcements bouncing off the cavernous ceiling. “Oh. No. Thanks.”
“Receipt?”
I shook my head wordlessly, stuffing a dollar into the tip jar. I was already running late. Again. I couldn’t miss my connecting flight. I grabbed my drink, glancing at the name written on the side of the cup.E-N-N.
Stupid tears pricked my eyes.
“Not everyone thinks Anne Shirley is a cultural icon,” Chris sometimes pointed out with gentle logic.
But Chris wasn’t here.
A lump lodged in my throat. Neither was Dad. Not here. Ever again.Gone.Another echo in the emptiness of my heart.
I was going home to my father’s funeral. Alone. Without my boyfriend.
It wasn’t Chris’s fault, I told myself as I sprinted for the gate, my carry-on bag banging behind me.
On Tuesday night, my mother had called, her voice uncharacteristically soft. Subdued. (“It’s your father. His heart…”) Chris had come straight from his shift, holding me as I ugly cried, plying me with mugs of tea and boxes of tissues. He’d rearranged his schedule so we could make the long drive together from Chicago to St. Ignace for the funeral. But then, at the last moment, one of his patients—a little boy with Ewing sarcoma—was readmitted to the hospital.
“I want to be there for you,” Chris had said in his best bedside manner, holding both my hands.
Thebutwas unspoken, like so many things between us.
But my work comes first.
But my patients need me more than you do.
Chris was a pediatric oncologist. He treated children with leukemia. Teens with brain tumors. Only a monster would insist that his presence at the funeral of a man he’d barely met was somehow more important.
His hands were smooth and warm. A doctor’s hands, calm and capable. I’d squeezed them back. “It’s okay,” I lied. “I’ll be fine.”
I admired his dedication so much.But(also unspoken) I needed him, too. I wanted him with me this weekend. Or maybe, now that Dad was gone, I just wanted to feel like I came first withsomebody.
The lump was back, a red-hot ache in my throat.
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