They will be beautiful this high up, so far from the lights of the city, the influence and evidence of civilization. It’s strange, don’t you think, that the only way for humans to truly see the stars is at a remove from the rest of humanity? That signifies something, I think. But at the moment I’m not exactly sure what. I’m cold and getting colder, consumed by the knowledge that the stars, while breathtakingly beautiful, are silent. They shine brightly but do not speak.
We are star-stuff. But more, I think.
We are what we’ve done, and said, and thought, and ignored. We are who we have loved and championed. Who we have failed and forgotten, and who we have forgiven. We are what we have believed, and what we have refused to believe.
We are star-stuff. But more. We are words and action, moment and place, doubts and faith. And story.
This is mine. I’d like to tell Jamie. I can’t. So I’m telling you.
I’m telling myself.
Chapter 1
Grace
One night after work, just a few months after I moved to Portland, I went into the bistro near my office for a bite to eat. I was sitting at the bar because it felt less conspicuous. The bartender and I struck up a conversation and a few minutes into it, he handed me a flyer for a grief support group. Apparently, he kept it and a supply of similarly helpful publications stowed next to the highball glasses. Bartenders and social workers have a lot in common, he said.
I’ve never been a joiner. The idea of sharing my problems with a roomful of strangers made my pulse race and my hands feel clammy. But I knew I couldn’t go on like I had been. I mean, if a bartender can peg your problems after one glass of crummy house chardonnay and ten minutes of awkward conversation, so can everybody else. And maybe I wouldn’t have to talk. Maybe I could just listen. It couldn’t hurt to try, right?
But when I got to the community center, I knew it wasn’t going to work. The members of the group were all women, all widows. Definitely not a club I was interested in joining. And apart from two people, including a woman with frizzy brown hair that kept falling into her eyes and who kept twitching and fidgeting in her seat, as if she was having a hard time sitting still, seventy was a fond but distant memory in the minds of the other participants. The room was filled by the sounds of sniffling, and the odor of White Diamonds perfume was so strong it almost made my eyes water.
The other woman I couldn’t help but notice was older but somehow not, the kind of woman who seems comfortable with her age and herself at any age. Her shoulder-length hair was a halo of curls around her head, a sandy blond color interspersed with threads of silver white. Her eyes were big and brown, and her gaze was very direct. Something about that made me feel like she saw things other people missed. Her clothes intrigued me too. I’ve always appreciated people who have a unique sense of style. I’d seen her blue and white skirt on sale recently, but I was pretty sure that her denim jacket, embroidered with birds and flowers, was done by hand. The fact that she’d paired it with red sneakers made me think she had a good sense of humor and didn’t take herself too seriously.
She seemed to be with the group, smiling warmly at many of the white-haired women, but not of it. She quietly made the rounds with her dog, a tail-thumping golden retriever who rested her muzzle in the laps of weeping participants, gazing intently until they started to stroke her silky head, smile wetly, and calm down, at which point she would move on to a new, more distraught participant.
Still, there was a lot of crying going on and it made me uncomfortable. During the bathroom break, I got up and quietly left. I was standing in the parking lot, about to unlock my car, when I heard a voice.
“Sneaking off?”
The woman with the frizzy hair was leaning against the hood of the red PT Cruiser parked next to me. Even though she was wearing a pair of thick-heeled clogs, shoes designed for comfort rather than fashion, she stood only a couple of inches over five feet. But somehow she seemed taller, partly because of her voice—big and brassy—but also because of her face. She had one of the most expressive faces I’d ever seen; every thought or opinion she had was telegraphed through her eyes, lips, nose, cheeks, and especially her eyebrows, dark brown and bristling, capable of moving in ways I’d never seen eyebrows move before. I remember thinking that in the days of silent films, she’d have been a star.
She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her purse.
“It’s not the right group for me,” I said, answering her question.
She didn’t say anything, just lit her cigarette and stared at me.
“I’m not a widow,” I explained.
“I am. But it’s not the right group for me either.”
She took a long draw, making the cigarette tip glow orange and puffing out her cheeks. It didn’t look like she was inhaling.
“It’s a grief support group, which is fine. But I’m not feeling particularly grieved. Pissed off, but not grieved. You’d think that in the whole city of Portland, there’d be at least one support group for the pissed-off widows of cheating husbands. I mean, I can’t be the only one, right?”
She blew out a long column of smoke and looked me up and down, eyebrows twitching and
