Houdini tore through the house, into the kitchen, and up onto her shoulder, nuzzling her the way he did when he thought someone was upset. She scratched his head, and he purred in her ear.
“And Dad wouldn’t want you to give up your life to come home and look after me. I’m fine the way my life is. I’m happy.”
Bri smiled, an I’ve-got-a-secret-I’m-bursting-to-share smile.
“What?” Julie’s muscles tightened in warning. “No. You’re not setting me up with someone on a blind date.”
“No. Of course not.” Bri grabbed both plates, sat at the bistro table, and handed Julie a fork. “Sit, eat, enjoy. Let me take care of you for a change.”
Julie placed Houdini on the ground and sat across from Bri. “I told you I don’t need taking care of. Besides, I want you to go live your life. How’s that boyfriend of yours?”
“Gone,” she said matter-of-factly and scooped up a bite of veggies.
“What happened?” Julie asked.
“Nothing. Just wasn’t right.” She shrugged, as if discussing the weather instead of her life.
This had to stop. Bri needed to focus on her own life and forget about Julie. “You don’t need to worry about me. There’s nothing wrong with me and the way I live my life. You need to start concentrating on your own future.”
“I knew you’d say that, but it isn’t just me.” Bri snagged her purse from the couch and returned, handing her an envelope.
“What’s this?” Julie eyed her daughter’s handwriting on the front of the envelope.
“Open it.” Bri took a large bite, but Julie wasn’t hungry all of a sudden.
She opened the first envelope and read the single sheet.
All call to Summer Island Book Club, January 14th.
Julie shook her head. “I don’t understand.” The words were hollow because her brain was processing a thirty-two-year-old message. The last time she’d seen those words, she was graduating high school. All her friends had moved on with their lives, leaving the slow, dyslexic, artsy girl behind to marry young because that was her only choice. Not that she regretted her years with Joe, not at all, but she had envied her friends’ worldly lives after graduation. Kat went Ivy League. Wind landed a part in a Broadway production. Trace joined some world-renowned ocean conservation company and made headlines cleaning up oil spills and inventing new ways to combat the plastic problem in the oceans.
Julie had stayed in the same town, doing the same thing, for three decades. “No,” she mumbled under her breath. “I don’t want to see them.”
Bri’s joyous expression folded into a frown. “But Dad used to always talk about how you and your high school friends could do anything together. That you were a girl powerhouse like this town had never seen. And no matter what, you all would drop everything to meet at your Friendship Beach for book club and anytime someone was in need.”
“That was then. They wouldn’t care now.” Julie’s hands trembled. To face so many successes while facing her own lack of living was too much. Not to mention they would never give up their lives for a childish notion of some female bonding time. “No way they’d show here. Please, tell me you didn’t send this to anyone.”
“I sent them to all of your friends, Kathryn Stein, Wendy Lively, and Trace Latimer.”
Julie shoved from the table and held her head as if it would lift from her body to escape the embarrassment of a pathetic attempt to reunite an old tradition that no one cared about anymore…Except her. She walked to the window and lifted the lace curtain, feeling the rough fabric between her fingers. Clouds must’ve rolled in, covering the moon, because the world seemed even darker than normal. “They won’t come.”
The chair squealed against the tile floor, and Bri approached. Three unopened envelopes were held in front of Julie. “They answered the call.”
Julie took the envelopes, recognizing the top message’s handwriting as Trace’s. The old friend she’d only spoken to via birthday and Christmas cards would never drop everything to come home for Julie’s birthday. Did she want to face the embarrassment of rejection? Yes, if it meant getting Bri to see the error of her ways and return to her own life.
Julie slid her finger under the lip, and it snapped free as if barely sealed. Her pulse quickened at the idea of having her old friends around her, yet fearing it all at once. She opened the paper and read:
It is my honor to answer the call of the Summer Island Book Club.
Tears pooled in Julie’s eyes at the thought of seeing her once closest friend again after all these years. If anyone would answer the call, it would be Trace. The others were never going to come. Last Julie had heard, Wind was on tour as a world-famous choreographer now, so she opened Wind’s envelope next. In swirling letters, as if she’d written it in calligraphy, it showed the same exact words that Trace had written.
It wasn’t possible. They hadn’t seen each other for over half their lives, despite her invitation during the holidays the first few years after they had left. By the third year, she’d given up and focused on her own family and let her childhood friends go.
Kathryn’s was last. The one who was born for greatness with a silver spoon in her mouth that her mother had shoved down her throat repeatedly as a kid. Apparently it had worked, though. She owned a law firm in San Francisco last Julie had heard. To her shock, she opened it to find the same message.
“So?” Bri asked from behind her.
“They’re answered. All of them.” Julie crumpled into the sitting chair by the front door.
Bri knelt in front of her. “Mom, what is it? I thought you’d be happy to have some time with old friends.”
“Yes and no.” Julie scanned her humble home. “I don’t know that I want my life overanalyzed and criticized. We were friends, but I was never like them. They’ve accomplished
