The Way Back to Happiness (6 page)

And when
she’d
been young, troubled, and brokenhearted, who had she been able to turn to? Not her mother, that was for darn sure. Gladys had always been able to shed a tear or two over the gentle wisdom of Marcus Welby, but when it came to the drama in her own house, she’d remained aloof. Even when Bev’s life had been ruined—permanently, irretrievably shattered to bits—Gladys had said she had to remain impartial. Impartial meant taking Diana’s side. As usual.

Old resentments filled her chest until she felt overinflated, breathless. She exhaled and forced herself to turn her thoughts in a different direction.
Forward, not backward.

There was so much she had to do. For one thing, she’d emptied out her craft room in anticipation of Alabama’s moving in, and now its contents sprawled through the rest of the house—wood and tools heaped in corners, bolts of cloth and yarn spilling across the dining room table. The sewing machine stood in a hallway, forcing her to walk sideways to squeeze past it every time she made a trip to the bathroom.

She’d intended to organize the garage to absorb the overflow, and had even gone so far as to contact Keith Mitchell about building shelves, but now Alabama wasn’t coming. The spare room could be the craft room again. Maybe that’s where Keith should build the shelves. But what should she do with the furniture in Alabama’s bedroom? The dresser might come in handy for storage, but the painted iron daybed she bought at a flea market would never be used enough to justify the space it took up.

The truth was, she hadn’t only been excited about the room, but also about the prospect of having someone else in the house. She hadn’t had a roommate since college—not that Alabama would have been a roommate, exactly, but she would have been company. Not very pleasant company all the time, if the past few weeks were any indication, but even a hostile Alabama would have been someone to share life with. Lately the years were spinning by faster and faster, and sometimes she felt so alone. Friends from high school had met their soul mates, married, had kids, pulled away from her. They had all moved away or were still in Dallas, busy with their lives, and she was busy, too, her own life consumed by school, hobbies, after-school Future Homemakers of America meetings and parent-teacher nights, and driving once a week to see her mother and run the same errands again and again.

Each time she stole out to visit old friends, it seemed they had less in common. These women griped almost boastfully about their busy days tending to children, and the trouble their sprawling suburban homes caused them, and the tribulations of school as seen from the other side. And vacations! Everyone had always just come back from or was about to jet off to somewhere exotic. When they asked about Bev’s life at all, the questions highlighted its deficits.
When are you going to get married? Do you see kids on the horizon?
They were waiting for her life to begin so she’d have something to talk about that interested them. She was waiting for that, too.

Of course, she had Derek.

Then again, she
didn’t
have Derek. He was independent, and both of them had been living alone for so long. Half the time she felt she’d die if he didn’t pop the question, but occasionally after he got into his truck and drove away, she’d collapse in relief to be alone again. Was a life as Mrs. Derek Matthews really her destiny? Was he really what she wanted?

Of course he was. Why else would she have broken it off with Glen? She had
pursued
Derek, who was more of her ideal. She wasn’t shallow, but everyone knew you couldn’t build a relationship if the physical part wasn’t right. Derek reminded her a little of Tom—unpredictable. Although other than that they were night and day.

Her breathing stilled as her mother’s words echoed in her head.
You still want what Diana had.

Why had her mother flung those words at her? Diana had been the covetous one. Diana was the one who’d taken what she’d wanted, consequences be damned.

The impulse to dig out her old photograph album spurred Bev to the hallway. She looked up at the square in the ceiling, the entry to the attic. All she had to do was reach up and draw down the ladder. Yet she resisted. So many nights had been lost that way—staring at photos of Tom, wallowing in memories until she was messy drunk on them. She’d finally stowed the pictures out of easy reach.

Of course, her memory didn’t require a visual prompt. Her mind could spin her back through the decades all on its own, but she’d done a fairly good job of training it to avoid the more maudlin pathways. Or she thought she had . . . until she’d looked into Alabama’s eyes. They were Tom’s eyes—brown, not Diana’s blue-green. Alabama didn’t have Diana’s auburn hair, either, but a dull blond closer to Bev’s own. Looking at her, she could almost imagine how it would have been if . . .

No.

Familiar footsteps tromped up the front stairs, and Bev hurried to the front door to meet Cleta, the mailwoman.
Letter carrier,
she corrected herself. During the school year, Bev was rarely at home when the mail arrived, but in summer Cleta was sometimes the only person she talked to all day long.

“Hey there,” Cleta said, surprised when Bev opened the door. “I didn’t expect to find you here today. Thought you were going to Big D.”

“I got back early.”

“Good for you. Gives you time to enjoy your Saturday instead of battling Dallas traffic.”

She handed Bev a bundle of mail and tapped the envelope on the top of the stack. “Sorry about that one. Got misdirected—address was wrong, I guess. By the looks of it you’d think it’d been to China and back.” She laughed. “Maybe it has. Anyhow, the envelope got ripped somewhere and somebody taped it back up, but I doubt it was actually tampered with.”

Distracted, Bev didn’t even look at the letter. “I’d rather you apologized for the junk. All these catalogs! Do so many people actually order things by phone?”

Cleta’s gaze rolled toward the sky-blue painted porch ceiling. “Whoo-ee! They certainly do. Mark my words, the day’s coming when folks won’t leave their La-Z-Boys even to buy groceries. Everything’ll come mail order. If that sounds like science fiction, believe you me, it’s not. Yesterday I delivered a frozen pot roast packed in dry ice to somebody.”

Bev shook her head in amazement and commiseration, and then Cleta hitched her mailbag and marched off down the street.

Bev retreated into the house, going straight for the trash can to deposit the catalogs and junk mail. Then she noticed the letter Cleta had been talking about, and stopped in her tracks. Scotch tape formed a jagged scar on the top of the envelope, but even more notable were the cross-outs and scrawled corrections across the front in different colors of ink, in several hands.
Not at this address. Returned. Redirected.
And at the center, the heart of all the chaos, a familiar loopy handwriting chilled Bev’s blood.

Diana’s handwriting.

She hadn’t seen it in years, except on the occasional letter lying around Gladys’s.

Why would Diana have written her?
How
could she have written her?

She squinted at the postmark. It was from early June. The tenth.

The day Diana died?

Spooked panic gripped her as she stared at this missive from beyond. How . . . ?

A breathless moment passed before realistic possibilities occurred to her.

Probably, by the time the letter was sent on its way, Bev was already in St. Louis, and Diana had been gone for twenty-four hours.

She lurched for the kitchen table and sat down, unable to pull her gaze from the envelope. No zip code, of course. No return address. And Diana had gotten her address all wrong, putting down a street name and number that Bev had lived at when she’d taught, briefly, in San Angelo. 202 Oak Street. The number was scratched out, and the street name. Evidently, the person at 202 Oak Street, New Sparta, had started to open it before realizing the error. Bev had done that once, and had foolishly worried that the postal police would come after her. Maybe this envelope had sat in a drawer before the person taped up the damage and sent it back.

Someone at the post office, someone who knew Bev, must have finally gotten hold of it, because the correct street address appeared in red ink in another hand.

Light-headed and feeling compelled to move, Bev stood, paced to the living room, then pushed aside a bag of buttons and other notions so she could lower herself into a chair at the dining room table. She tapped the letter against the tabletop. Diana had never written her in all these years. What was this—a parting shot? A final dig?

She ripped open the envelope and pulled out a piece of spiral notebook paper with fringe still clinging to the left side. One corner bore a jagged tear from when the sheet had been ripped out. Typical Diana not to bother with stationery. Or neatness. Although this penmanship was beyond bad. It was frightening. Blue ink dipped down the page and up again, heedless of lines, a weaving car of text. Bev frowned and flipped the page. The erratic childish scrawl covered both sides. And then her gaze snagged on the last line.

She turned the paper back over and slapped it down on the table. Vodka and lemonade churned in her stomach.

Could this be the missing suicide note?

No. Diana’s death had been an accident. Had to have been—for all the reasons she and her mom had discussed.

But why after all these years would Diana decide to write her, out of the blue, right before her fatal accident? Wasn’t that too much of a coincidence?

From the beginning, Bev had suspected suicide. But then she’d met Alabama at the camp, and she doubted. No matter what Diana had done wrong in life, she’d always kept her daughter close. Alabama had been her life. She wouldn’t have abandoned her like that.

Or would she?

She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Cold dread filled her. Dread and cowardice. Maybe it would have been better if the letter had stayed lost. But now that the thing was in her possession, what choice did she have but to read it?

It was hard to keep her hand steady as she picked up the page again. Her heart jackhammered, and her eyes strained to focus on the words.

Bev read the letter over and over until a strange sound made her tilt her head. It was only then she realized that the sound was the keening cry coming from her own throat.

Diana had sat in her apartment, her disgusting apartment, writing this. When? Maybe it was the last thing she had done. Twelve hours later, Bev had arrived. By then, Diana had been taken away, but the glass and bottle she’d been drinking from were still on her coffee table. She’d drunk that gin, written that letter, and then staggered out to a mailbox. And then she’d done it.

If only she had found the nerve! If she’d called Bev—or called Mama, or
someone
—maybe they could have talked her out of it. Of course, Bev would have been the last person she’d reach out to....