“I try,” I tell her, thinking of all the times I try to be peaceful with my family. “I answer most of her calls. I listen to her tell me what a lousy person I am.”
“Well that’s not true.” She squeezes my hand. “Maybe I should have a talk with her.”
I give her an appreciative smile as I wonder what it would be like to have someone like her in my corner for real. I can’t imagine her being disappointed in or taking sides against her loved ones.
“She has a party coming up this weekend for her birthday,” I tell her.
“Are you going?”
I make a face.
“You should go. Be the bigger person.”
“But she invited my sister and the two of them together are just poison to me.”
“Take Whitney,” she says, pointing at my friend who’s feeding a cupcake to Mr. Henry. “Take her before she ruins my chess game tonight.”
Laughing, I watch my friend tease him with a dab of icing. It’s clear Mr. Henry is having the time of his life. Still, I turn to my other friend and wink. “Whitney has nothing on you, Gretchen.”
“Damn right.” A somber look crosses her face. “I want you to remember something for me, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You can’t choose how people treat you or the actions they take. They get up in the morning and have to see the ugly things they do reflected in their face.” She rolls her wheelchair back and then centers it in front of me so we’re face-to-face. “You, dear girl, only have to live with how you let them affect you. When you look in the mirror, you get to see all the pretty that you are inside and which you radiate.”
“Sometimes they make me feel really ugly,” I admit.
“Because you let them.” It’s the simplest answer she could give and the one that hits the hardest. “When you get to be my age, you start thinking a lot about death. You look back on your life and think of all the people you already lost and know the people you see around this room will start dropping like gnats.”
“Gretchen!”
“It’s true,” she shrugs. “But listen to me—life isn’t that complicated. It’s meant to be lived with those we can’t live without.”
“That sounds pretty complicated.”
“It’s not.”
It’s such a simplistic way of looking at things and couldn’t possibly hold true. There’s no room in that philosophy to account for the unknown: other people, or emotions, or the bad things that can happen to us.
“You live your life and you fill it with all those people who make you feel like getting up in the morning. The ones who give you life. And the rest of them?” She blows a breath. “The rest of them you just let go.”
“Even if it’s my mother?”
“Maybe,” she shrugs. “Maybe not. Here’s a rule of thumb for you: treat people how you’d treat them if you knew they’d be dead tomorrow. Because they might be. Sometimes that means forgiving and moving on and sometimes it’s just forgiving. The key to it is finding your joy and what you need to do for you—not them.”
The events coordinator taps me on the shoulder. “We have a man who just came in from outside and didn’t get a cupcake. He’s very upset. You don’t have any more, do you?”
“You know I do,” I laugh. “I’ll go grab them.” Before I get up, I look back at Gretchen. “I appreciate you, you know that?”
“You bring me joy. Great joy, Mariah.”
I make my way outside. The sun is a bold orange with its promise to dip behind the horizon. Thinking about what Gretchen said and then about baby Betsy and my grandmother, I know what I want to do.
Unlocking the car, I get into the back seat first. My purse is on the floorboard and I pull it up next to me.
Grabbing my phone, I flip through the screen until I see the app. Just the green logo with blue letters make me feel like a different person. Stronger. More confident. And it’s not until I swipe my finger over the image and see Lance’s icon, that I realize why.
This is why it was so easy for me to open up to him. He doesn’t just make me feel good in general. He makes me feel good about me.
With each tap of my fingers on the screen, some of my confidence gets wiped out by nerves. I hit ‘send’ in a flurry before I can talk myself out of it.
Me: Any chance you’d reconsider that date?
The little bubbles appear almost instantly and I hold my breath until the words he typed appear on the screen.
History Hunk: Oh, probably. My schedule is pretty open at the moment.
What does he mean by that? Am I bothering him by asking? Maybe he’s over this. Maybe he has a date.