Chapter 1
Kendra didn’t remember the ride. She stared through the windshield, feeling comforted by the rhythm of the wipers clearing away the rain. She let her memory take her home. How long had it been? She found herself visiting less and less over the years. At first telling herself she was too busy and she would go as soon as she could.
Now the universe was screaming at her that it was time to go back. Five year. It had been five years since she had been back to Maple Valley. Her grandmother was gone and now it was up to her to comb through her possessions. Time to decide which memories were worth keeping and which ones would line the dusty shelves of the town’s tiny Goodwill.
Not that Kendra was solely responsible for such an arduous task, her mother would be the one leading the charge. Rochelle had moved back to their sleepy hometown two years ago to help with Laurel’s diminishing health. Her mom left right after Kendra’s brother graduated high school. After raising two kids on her own she was finally able to take those trips she had always told them about. One day, she would say, you’ll have to track me in Italy or Greece, Keni. When you and Charlie are all grown up, I’ll basically live on a jet.
She basically did.
After Charlie graduated from high school, he moved out with the plan of selling his art or music or stories. Off he went, crossing a couple state line, four hours from home, in a shoebox of an apartment with three other thespian types he found through an online ad. Just his dream of creating driving him forward.
After Charlie left, Rochelle packed up their home and sold what she could. She stored the rest of what she couldn’t at her mother’s and became a flight attendant. Taking on as many hours they would give her with the goal to never stop moving. A tiny apartment outside of Boston, just a train ride from Kendra’s office. They would try to get lunch whenever her mom was in the area, but she was always trying to work a flight that took her somewhere she’d never been.
When Laurel got sick however, Rochelle didn’t hesitate to return home and be there for ever second she could. Kendra began actively avoiding Maple Valley after her mother moved there to help. She didn’t want to imagine her grandmother struggling to stand or needing help to shower. Laurel, the woman who went on camping trips in the remote woods alone. The woman who would tinker on her own car. The woman who took her and her brother out in the winter to practice survival skills, just in case you get turned around out there and you need to survive until I find you.
At first, Kendra didn’t go home as much after she graduated because she was busy. She got a new apartment with a few roommates from school and started a new job at a start-up. She didn’t want to let the little publishing company down. She wanted to pour every moment she could to help it succeed, even if it meant dropping what she was doing that weekend to go into the office and double check everything was in order.
Once her grandmother was in need of her mother’s help to survive, Kendra knew she was too late to visit the grandmother she remembered. She wasn’t strong enough to see her struggle and now the guilt of not seeing her for the last five years threatened to come up from behind her and swallow her up.
Now she was gone and Kendra had to face the fact that she had be “too busy” to visit. The weekly phone calls had turned to monthly and then monthly phone calls became calls on their birthdays. I hope you’re taking some time for yourself, baby, her grandmother said on Kendra’s 28th birthday, I would hate for you to miss this beautiful life of yours.
Miss it? Kendra didn’t know if she even had the time to have one in the first place. She poured and poured and poured into Moredu Inc. There were so few hands and she was wearing too many hats. Until one day she woke up to a text from the owner, Shelly, Yeahhh, I think it’s time to accept the fact that we can’t make a small publishing house work. I’m over it and I’m closing it down.
Just like that, all of Kendra’s hours were for nothing. All of her time, wasted. Before Kendra could figure out what to do with the reality of finding a new job, her mom called. Her grandmother had died. It was time to go home.
