Redwood Bend

“It used to break my heart. She’d go to bed when the kids did, because staying up and having a whole long evening alone, it was too lonely. She said she was never too lonely in the early morning or the afternoon, but the nights were always hard. She missed going to bed with her man at night. It never got easier to go to bed alone, she said. It’s kind of hard to get used to the idea that your beautiful little sister has that kind of loneliness.”
“Even though you’ve had some serious loneliness of your own?” Leslie asked him.
“Even though. So when I met that Dylan character, I tried not to count on him too much, but there was no missing that her eyes were brighter. Her smile was pretty loaded, like she had one helluva secret. She was happy. And I’ll admit, I hoped this was something that would work out for her.”
“She did, too,” Leslie said.
“She’s okay now?”
“Conner, she might be a little emotional for a while. You have to let it go, let her grieve it in her own way and time.”
“Yeah,” he said grumpily. “You’re probably right… So, did she say what she’s going to do tonight? Since we left her?”
Leslie looked at Conner sympathetically. “She said she’s going to bed early.”
Grrrr came from the driver’s side. “I’m going to have to beat the shit out of that son of a bitch.”

Twelve

T he phone didn’t ring again for Katie, not that she expected it to. She did have this wild and uncontrollable wish that Dylan would call her every day or several times a day, to have him say he’d been a fool to leave her as he had, to promise to be back to see her because he couldn’t stay away. She wouldn’t even consider it, of course. She would say, Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice… That she wanted to see him, that went without saying. But she wouldn’t take that chance again. It couldn’t possibly make the whole thing hurt less.
She had a few shameless problems over the following week. She couldn’t stop herself from going to the grocery store in Fortuna and lingering in the magazine aisle and at the checkout, looking for a familiar face. He was still an item, it appeared, though there didn’t seem to be any more kissing on the front pages. It was hard not to buy those papers, bring him home with her, but she resisted valiantly. Still, she kept the ones she had, tucked away in the trunk that held other keepsakes.
She had read and reread the articles, however. It was so like twenty years ago when her Teen magazine was shredded from use. One story said that Dylan had been living on his famous grandmother’s Montana estate. Wow. You’d think he could afford jeans without holes in the knees, right?
She cried some, but not malignantly. She knew her twinkle was gone. In fact, she just didn’t feel quite right—the whole ordeal had robbed her of appetite and unsettled her eating and sleeping patterns. No big surprise there—that’s why the term divorce diet had been invented. Katie really didn’t have weight to spare, however. If Dylan made her gaunt and thin in addition to everything else he’d done, she was really going to be pissed off.
She tried to push herself to spend a little more time with people, even if they did want to know what was wrong. Jack Sheridan always asked if she was feeling any better, which implied he knew all the reasons she wasn’t feeling that great. She forced a smile and said, “Much. Thanks.”
She sat with Leslie and her young neighbor, Nora, on Leslie’s front porch and talked about everything from bad haircuts to having children and she found she could open up to Nora. Though young, she seemed so worldly. She had two little girls, nine months and two years, and was not only a single mom but a never-married single mom who had escaped a brutal relationship. Even though Katie had lost her husband to a war, she was not oblivious to the challenges Nora had faced. And it was Nora who said, “Reverend Kincaid really helped me get on my feet after I’d been dumped here without a dime to my name. Now I have two part-time jobs and can take my kids to both of them if I have to—I work at the clinic with Mel Sheridan and at the school with Becca Timm, the teacher, and some other mothers. But the most important thing is how practical and nonjudgmental Reverend Kincaid has been. I was very reluctant to go talk to a preacher after all the horrid things I’d done to get myself into my own mess.”
Even with that glowing endorsement, Katie