Hannah looked around the cemetery, bright and filled with history. It wasn’t creepy or sad. It was...alive, somehow, this place. With the memories of all of these souls. The lives that had come before them. Part of the fabric that made the town they lived in. For they’d built the foundations, the houses, the businesses. The streets that they all still walked on.
This wasn’t a sad place at all, it was...brimming with hope. With truth.
“I could only let myself want one thing,” Hannah said. “I loved too many things too much. And my music teacher...he took advantage of how much I loved the violin. He...made me think I needed to give him my body to have my dreams. And I was so afraid that if I ever loved another thing I could be hurt like that again. But the violin was already a scar so I just...pursued it. Doggedly. Determinedly. Single-minded. But I’ve run out of steam on that now, and I can’t be one thing. I have to be more.”
She looked down at the quilt square in her hand.
The party dress nestled against plain cotton.
I want stars again...
Hannah was both. The girl who’d grown up in this town and the girl who’d run away. The woman who’d made a career for herself in the symphony, and who had fallen for a man in a small town where she’d never be able to have the kind of career she used to dream of.
“This is who we are,” Hannah said. “All of us. These are the women that make up our history. And they were brave, and they were flawed. And we’re them. They’re part of our story. And we didn’t know.”
Avery frowned. Lark went to her knees next to Gram’s headstone, brushing her fingers over the lettering.
“I wish I could have talked to her. About how it feels to lose your child.”
“You can talk to us,” Avery said. “That’s what we have to do. Talk to each other. And I need to make sure I keep talking to my kids. So that they know me. The real me. Not some sanitized version that I’m trying to show them to make them feel better. Because it doesn’t help, does it? You just end up thinking you’re the only one with problems. You want to hide things and try to make them easier, but it doesn’t make it easier. Mom didn’t know Gram’s history, and she just thought it meant Gram didn’t love her. But that wasn’t true. It was herself that Gram didn’t love.”
“They were all so desperately human,” Hannah said. “And didn’t want to be. I relate to that.”
“Me too,” Avery said.
“I don’t want to go back to Boston,” Hannah confessed. “And this is the first time I’ve been able to say that and not feel like it’s giving up, or failing. And not feel like it means the last nineteen years have been nothing. Because they haven’t been. I needed them. I’m not failing by being done. Because that’s it, I just... I want more than one thing from my life. I played, and it was wonderful. I loved it. And it gave me distance from here. From what happened.”
She looked into the sun, squinted and pretended the moisture in her eyes was all from that. “I always felt like I bought my scholarship with my body. And if you’re going to be a whore you better be a really great one. I’m good at extremes. And I think it made me get obsessed in a way... I love it. I love it, and I’m not sorry that I went to Boston.” She ran her thumb over the beading on the dress. “I can’t be one thing anymore. And that will mean...compromise I guess? I don’t even know what that feels like. But I’m a woman, not just a musician. I’ve been a victim,” she looked at Avery, “but that doesn’t mean I’m not strong. I have to figure out what staying here means for my life. What I’ll do. I mean, I’ll still play. But, it’s going to definitely be on a much smaller scale.”
“Do you really want to leave Boston?” Lark asked.
She nodded slowly. “Yes. Because being back here made me realize how much I miss all of you. Maybe in a way I never did before. If you’re just staying gone because you’re trying to prove your own point, and prove that you’re right...well, that’s not really strong either. That’s just rebellion. I don’t think I’m ever going to be special until I decide what that means. And what I have here, that’s special. What I have with all of you.”
“Josh?” Avery asked.
“Yeah,” Hannah said. “I think I want to stay for him too. Seventeen-year-old me is tearing her hair out.”
“But you’re not seventeen anymore.”
She laughed. “And thank God. I can accept a whole lot more complication than seventeen-year-old me could. I can see a lot more about how the world is put together. With cotton and chiffon and glass beads, all beautiful together. Party dress fabric sewn into a heritage quilt.”
She sat down on the ground next to Lark, and put the picnic basket in front of them. And then Avery sat down next to her. Lark put her head on Hannah’s shoulder, and she put her arm around her younger sister.
“It’s amazing,” Hannah said. “How much talking changes things.”
“It helps when someone is there to listen,” Avery said.
“I’ll always be here to listen,” Lark said.
“Let’s just all be here. For each other. Talking and listening and everything.”
And then Lark and Avery both reached into their bags, and took out their quilting. Lark had a large yellow square, which she turned away from them, but began working away on.
The sun
