“How’s that going?” she asked delicately. Though none of her friends had had picture perfect lives, she was the only one of the group who had experience going through a divorce. And though that wasn’t Tyler and Cadence’s stage, at least not yet, she knew something about the pain of drifting apart from someone you thought you’d love forever.
Cadence shrugged unhappily.
“I mean, it’s notgoing. It’s just… it just stinks, is all. And I can’t sit in it forever, so I’m trying to figure out how to move forward.”
The way she looked down at her hands indicated that she didn’t want to speak about it any longer, so Eleanor just gave her hand one more pat and moved on.
“Well,” Miriam said brightly. “Enough of the gossip, ladies. We’re here to have a book club, aren’t we?”
Cadence shot her friend a grateful look. They all knew that Miriam could gossip with the best of them, although she never meant anything unkind by it. She was a meddler, but a good-hearted one.
“Yeah, enough with the chitchat,” June chimed in. “Books or cake. Those are our options.”
“Or booksandcake,” Diana said. “Let’s not limit ourselves.”
As she watched Cadence’s mood visibly lighten, Eleanor thought about how lucky she was to have friends like these. Her bookstore was coming along too, and she was dating a wonderful man. She knew Cadence was going through a tough time now, but she hoped the other woman knew that there was sunshine on the far side of this period of darkness.
After all, Eleanor was nothing if not living proof of that.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Benjamin!” June called over her shoulder to her son, who she could hear giggling about something deeper in the house. “It’s almost time for school!”
“Coming, Mommy!”
“Well, that didn’t sound convincing,” June muttered to herself as she put everything into her son’s backpack. The summer school program that was offered by Magnolia Shore school district had, thankfully, started that Monday morning. While June loved the extra time with her son that came with school vacations, she couldn’t deny that not having a place for Benjamin to go all day made her life a lot harder. Fortunately, for Benjamin’s age group, the “summer school” was really more part summer camp, part school. If it had just been regular school, June knew she would have had a much harder time convincing Benjamin to go every morning. It also helped that Isabelle Meadows attended, and BenjaminlovedIzzy.
That said, liking where they were going didn’t always matter all that much when it came to getting little kids out of the house. They were still easily distracted enough that sometimes it felt like arranging an entire battalion.
June had been doing the single parent thing for long enough to know that you never,everlooked the other way at a spare few minutes. If Benjamin was distracted, she was going to accomplish things.
Quickly, she put his lunch box in his backpack, then flipped open her calendar to consult her schedule. June was nothing without her calendar. Basically her entire life was in this thing.
Today, she confirmed, she had a housekeeping job followed by an evening shift at the diner. Cadence would take Benjamin home with her after summer school… and yes, June thought, rifling back through her memories, she had remembered to sign the form that let the school release Benjamin into Cadence’s care. Thank goodness.
It was always something, she thought with a dry little chuckle.
“Hey, Mommy, have you seen my sock?”
June paused her packing. The last she’d seen Benjamin, he’d been wearing socks and shoes, so this was a definite step backward.
Indeed, when she looked at him, he had one sock and shoe on, one off.
“Oh, Ben,” she sighed. “Where’d you take it off?”
He looked at his foot like it was the most surprising thing in the universe. “I don’t know.”
“Can you go check your bedroom?”
“Okay!” he chirped, sprinting back up the stairs.
She shook her head. Sometimes it still really hit her, how much Benjamin reminded her of Keith, his father and her late husband.
Losing Keith and becoming a single parent all in one day had been… well, it had been the worst day of June’s life, without contest. And the days after had been unimaginably hard too.Honestly, some of her days were still tough, even two years out from that terrible, terrible day.
But for all the struggles of being a single mom, she wouldn’t trade her son for anything. She wouldn’t trade the memories of Keith for anything either, even if they made her feel a little melancholy at times. And she loved the moments when she could see her late husband in Benjamin. They felt like a little gift, like Keith was giving her a little wave hello, even from beyond the unbridgeable divide that separated them. It was a comforting kind of thought.
She smiled about it… quickly. She didn’t have a lot of time to dwell on the past, not with her busy schedule, and especially not when she was trying to get out of the house.
