“I know, but I forgot I have to . . . call someone.” She’s already weaving her way down the bleachers, seeking empty spots on benches for her boots. It’s slow going, and several -people expect her to stop and chat. She brushes them off and keeps going, clutching her phone in her trembling hand and heading toward the nearest set of doors.
At last, she steps outside into the cold night air. Only then does she exhale. She hadn’t even realized she’d been holding her breath.
A light sleet is falling, landing in droplets on the backlit screen.
“Moisture isn’t good for electronics,” she hears herself telling Mick, who’s always leaving his own phone by the tub or kitchen sink.
“It’s okay,” he invariably responds.
“It’s not okay.”
After all these years, the maternal ritual plays out in her head like an oldies soundtrack on the radio, so much a part of her that she barely takes notice.
Her feet carry her on a familiar route across the back parking lot toward the gazebo that was donated by her sister’s senior class upon their graduation. Noreen Carmichael had spearheaded the fund--raising efforts and proudly wielded the scissors at the ribbon--cutting ceremony.
How well Rowan recalls her parents’ pride in her sister on that sunny June day over thirty years ago. How well she remembers their shame when she herself was caught on that very spot a few years later, cutting class and smoking—-just regular cigarettes that day, thank goodness.
It wasn’t the first time she’d gotten into trouble, but it was memorable for a -couple of reasons. She wasn’t just given detention, she was suspended. Dad yelled, Mom sobbed; they doled out the usual grounding and warnings and threats, none of which got through to her. It took a tragedy for Rowan to wake up and make the promise she’s bent on keeping to this day.
Directly on the heels of Rowan’s disgrace, Mom was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, a fast--moving, virulent form of cancer. She lived mere weeks. In one of her final lucid moments, she begged her youngest daughter to “be a good girl.”
And from that day on, I was.
Stepping into the gazebo, Rowan heads for the bench where she held court on many a defiant day—-and night—-surrounded by fellow mavericks who have long since faded from her life. Perhaps a few managed to redeem themselves, moving away, joining the military. But most of those kids burned out quickly after high school and more than one died young, their granite headstones in Holy Angels Cemetery a somber reminder of the road not taken.
Ironic, Rowan thinks, that in this spot at this time of year, when the branches are bare, there’s a pretty good view of Milkweed Pond. That’s where she and Jake went skating on their first date twenty--five years ago. It was Christmas night, and snow was falling like moonlit glitter, and their paths were forever altered the moment they kissed. She vividly remembers praying that he felt the same sparks and promising God that she would never ask Him for anything else if this perfect man could just fall in love with her.
He wasn’t perfect, of course. But she didn’t notice or care. If someone had time traveled back to that moment from the future to assure her that she would wear Jake Mundy’s wedding ring and bear his children and share his bed for the rest of her life, she’d have been ecstatic.
And if that same someone had told her that one day she’d resent that Jake snores and doesn’t know how to cook, that he whistles in the shower and considers khaki and gray compatible clothing colors, that she would eventually—-even just fleetingly—-find someone else more attractive and appealing . . .
She’d have said that was impossible.
Even now that it’s actually happened, that last part seems impossible.
Beneath the shelter of the octagonal wooden roof, she pushes away her first--date memories of Jake on a sickening tide of remorse. Again, she focuses on her phone.
She is, indeed, now Facebook friends with Rick Walker.