“What if she doesn’t know?”
She looked around the room at her daughters, and it was Avery who spoke.
“Well, it’s been my experience that the secret itself is really the problem. So much as what happened to make you keep it. And in the long run, secrets don’t really do anyone any favors. So maybe she won’t want to know. And maybe it will cause problems. But what if... What if she could really use some family? What if she has questions too? None of you could help me until you knew the truth.”
“All right,” Lark said. “Let’s find her. At the very least... At the very least she can know that Gram loved her.”
And it wasn’t so neat for Mary, because this had given her an entire new way to see her mother. A dimension of who she was, as a woman. As a person who was broken and flawed. But it didn’t answer the question of whether or not she had loved Mary. Or if she had just loved that beautiful young soldier, and the daughter she had with him.
But eventually, that had to stop mattering. She had to stop being angry. She had to choose how she wanted to live.
She took a deep breath. “We’ll see what we can find out.”
Avery
It was late, and Avery was reeling from the revelations of the night.
Lark’s baby.
Her grandmother, the loss of the love of her life and her child.
The weight of tonight was heavy. So heavy.
She couldn’t sleep. So she pulled out Anabeth’s diary, and sat at the foot of her bed, looking around the room. At the beautiful, textured wallpaper and the intricate wainscoting. And she sat there, holding the book in her hand, feeling the history pressing in all around her.
The generations that had lived here before her.
The lives that were here now.
They all carried so much pain around with them.
Her grandmother, with her bright red hair, and easy smile, had clearly spent years consumed with grief.
And so had her sister. Her sister, who had run in much the same way Gram had.
And she hadn’t blamed Hannah for not making an announcement about what had happened between her and her violin teacher. There would be a time and a place to talk about it, but she knew that Hannah needed to sort through it in herself first.
Her kids would carry pain too. From their childhood. From their father. And no doubt from her, because they each carried a piece of baggage from their own wonderful, loving mother.
It was a frustrating and dark revelation, coming on the heels of all of the good that had happened earlier today.
But maybe that was just it. Everything didn’t need to be perfect for hope to exist. There could still be light even when there was a little darkness.
And they were all just doing the best they could.
She opened up the diary, and started to read. She made it to their marriage, and her breath caught when she saw Anabeth’s new name. And when she finished the last entry, tears were streaming down her face.
The house is finished and it is beautiful. I told him we didn’t need anything so grand, but he insisted on making me feel at home. I told him my home is anywhere he is. I have learned the heart can heal in such miraculous ways. I have a new home now, Oregon. I have a new husband, and he has my heart. This house is a new view, but with John’s blessing I kept the parlor curtains. The view is new, and pieces of the life I had are part of how I see that view. For we are both what our past lives made us, and we are living this new one together. What a wonderful thing, to realize there can be new life after sorrow. To know you can build a new home, always.
Anabeth Dowell’s diary,
in The Dowell House in Bear Creek, Oregon, 1866
“Because of course. Of course you are, Anabeth,” she said, touching the pages.
Anabeth Dowell.
Who had left home, started over, endured loss, and been brave enough to find love.
Who had made a new view.
A new view.
I hung the parlor curtains in our window. And the view is beautiful.
They had hung here. In this house. And they had belonged to her great-great-grandmother. And so did her spirit. It belonged to all of them. To her, to Lark and Hannah, their mother.
To Gram.
It was why they still stood; it was why they forged on. It was why they still hoped.
Because this strong, brave woman, who had endured the loss of the man she loved and left everything she’d ever known, shared her blood with them.
Her story was part of them.
Her story. The curtains.
The quilt.
The wedding dress was Gram’s.
It was their story. The story of their family. Coming together.
She thought of the man who’d come into the store, and the thrill of sharing a moment with him. It wasn’t about him. It was about the possibility.
It wasn’t just one new view, it was many. Not about finding perfect, or neat or certain. But embracing this wide-open path, as broad and big as the prairie.
The grass is like the sea...
And she could follow it in any direction she chose.
She stood from the bed and went and looked out the window, at the night sky, scattered with stars.
She couldn’t see the future. And she couldn’t take away the bad. But she could move forward. And make all the good that she could.
And she would. She would.
35
There’s an honesty to being sixteen. You think about your feelings. You let yourself and everyone around you know exactly what they are. But then you start wanting to look a certain way. Have a certain life. You can lose yourself somewhere in the middle of it. I lost myself. I let myself believe that joy was a house, a position in the community, the envy of others, rather than a glow in my
