“Every Wednesday?”
“Every single one. I’m the last of the bunch. The last of the Wednesday Walkers.” She sighed deeply, then brushed her bangs out of her eyes. “Bertie died back in October, right after our walk. Bless those girls, they talked a good talk about wanting to trek abroad. We had such grand plans, too. Following in Alfred Wainwright’s footsteps in the Lake District. Doing the Appalachian Trail. The Cinque Terre. But we never made it out of Vermont together. Life called. If there weren’t children, there were husbands to take care of. And then there was always the issue of money. But you’re too young to understand all that.”
“I get it. We’re here for my dad. He’s going blind.” I followed Grace as she started up on the trail again, thinking about all the life and living my parents had forfeited.
“I heard.”
“You did?”
Grace stopped. Turning to face me, her eyes scanned mine. I didn’t know what she was searching for, but she said, “You mentioned it earlier.”
“I did?” I said, dismayed. I hated sharing our private business, having seen too much pity in people’s eyes over the years when they learned how cash-strapped my family sometimes was.
“You know, our Wednesday walks gave us midweek exercise, but it was so much more than that. It was being there when breast cancer took Olivia. And Kat lost her baby, and then her husband turned to the bottle. And…” Grace waved her hand in the air as though conceding to an entire lifetime’s heartache, then blew her breath out. “When terrible things happen to us, it’s so easy to think that our lives are nothing but rubble.”
“I know.”
She gestured to the ruins in the far-off distance. “But here we are, looking at broken rocks! We’re admiring these ruins like they’re artwork.”
“It’s a little weird when you put it that way.”
“And you know what the biggest shame is? All the people who are alive but aren’t really living because they’re still trapped in their own ancient rubble! Me included! Right before Kat died, back in ’ninety-six, Bertie and I promised that at least one of us would make it here. But then there was this excuse, and that reason…” Unconsciously, Grace pressed her hand to her husband’s wedding ring. “So after Bertie’s funeral, I said to myself, ‘Enough, Grace. This is the year.’ And then Stesha called.”
“She did?”
“On our last trek together, Camino de Santiago, she told me the exact same thing.” She straightened her backpack on her shoulders. “‘This is the year, Grace Hiyashi. You aren’t getting any younger.’”
“It’s Wednesday,” I told her.
“It is.”
As we continued walking, I couldn’t help but think about Reb and Ginny. I said, “I have my own Wednesday Walkers, but we’re called the Bookster Babes, for our mother-daughter book club.”
“That’s great, honey! And I bet you girls know each other’s secrets.”
“Pretty much.” But that wasn’t the whole truth. Instead of pretending that I had it all together, I should have told my friends the truth: I had a secret boyfriend who had dumped me, the girl everyone thought did all the dumping. The girl who adopted a Boy Moratorium to stop all the boyfriend drama when really, she was just afraid to be hurt again. The next best thing was to tell Grace now. So I confessed, “Well, they knew everything except a guy I was dating. He asked me not to tell anyone about us.”
“Why on earth would he do that?” Then Grace guessed before I had a chance to answer. “How much older was he?”
I gaped at her. “How’d you know?”
“Why else would he need to keep you a secret?”
“He didn’t know that I was only fifteen until the very end. Well, I was almost sixteen, not that it really matters. He was twenty-two.”
“Trust me, Shana,” said Grace, her eyes unwavering as she stood her ground. “He knew. You don’t get to be twenty-two and not be able to tell when someone doesn’t have much life experience. I mean, really!”
This time when we started walking, I was the one dragging behind. It was as if the stone-enforced fortress that I’d erected around myself since Dom was crumbling with my every step. Dom knew? There it was, the nagging memory of him sidestepping the waiter who asked to see my ID on our second date, a dinner at a romantic seafood restaurant at the edge of the lake. “No wine for her tonight,” Dom had said smoothly. “She’s training for a marathon.” I had felt so special because Dom had tracked our conversation from the first date in a way that virtually none of my high school boyfriends ever had, never mind that I had said I was thinking about running the Seattle Marathon. He had actually listened and remembered—and was proactive!
Our conversation must have energized Grace, because she picked up the pace. For the first time since the last rest break, we were within view of Stesha and Mom, though they were still pinpricks in the distance.