The Ocean Between Us - Susan Wiggs

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congested, or maybe she’d been crying. “Grace, hi. It’s Lauren. I—um—look, I canceled fitness class today and couldn’t find anyone to cover for me. Sorry about that.”

      Grace winced at the emotional pain she heard in Lauren’s tone. Josh had been gone only a few weeks, and already Lauren was falling apart.

      Grace hurt for Lauren. The two of them had their ups and downs, that was for sure, but extraordinary circumstances bound them together into an uneasy sisterhood of shared hopes and fears.

      She had the phone in her hand, ready to start returning calls, as the final message played. “Hello, Grace. It’s Peggy from Buskirk Law Offices. I just wanted to let you know that I sent the packet over by messenger.” The voice paused as though, in the midst of a routine procedure, the speaker felt the weight of it. “The papers are ready to sign. Good luck, Grace.”

      Good luck. Grace felt a strange sort of dread. What did she think she was doing? What was she doing?

      She set down the phone, not quite ready to talk to Lauren—to anyone—just yet.

      As she sat there, trying to make sense of everything she was feeling, teetering on the edge of taking a major step in her life, she heard the muffled sound of a car door slamming. Then another. Frowning slightly, because she wasn’t expecting anyone, she stood and went to the vestibule to see who it was. As she passed the hall tree mirror, she caught another glimpse of herself and smoothed her hands down her pencil-straight, raspberry-colored skirt.

      Through the antique lace panel covering the front door, she saw the wet black gleam of a Navy vehicle, a common-enough sight on base, but fairly rare beyond the confines of the Naval Air Station.

      The front gate opened. Between the tall hedges of climbing roses, two men emerged.

      When Grace saw them, every cell in her body came to ringing attention. She could hear, far away in another part of the house, the sound of a faucet dripping and Daisy scratching at the back door. The scent of roses and orange-oil furniture polish hung in the air. The wispy lace covering the front door softened and distorted the features of her visitors, but even so, Grace knew exactly what she was seeing. The nightmare every military wife dreaded.

      A Navy chaplain and the Casualty Assistance Calls Officer, coming up the walk.

      PART 2

      Point of Embarkation

      POE: Point of Embarkation: to make a start, to engage, enlist, or invest in an enterprise.

      CHAPTER 5

      Nine months earlier

      In the cramped, overheated dressing room of a self-consciously hip boutique called Wild Grrl, Katie Bennett’s head popped through the neck opening of a green Free People sweater. “How about this one, Mom?”

      Grace helped her adjust the sweater, smoothing her hand down the textured mohair knit. Moving to Washington State from Texas over the summer meant the kids needed sweaters and jackets. As she turned Katie square into the mirror, she sneaked a glance at the tag dangling from the armpit—$64.99. Great. “It’s a good color on you,” she said. “Too bad it doesn’t even cover your navel.”

      Katie turned this way and that, lifting a mop of straight brown hair off her neck and contemplating her reflection with the hypersensitive, overcritical eye of a fourteen-year-old girl. Grace wanted to tell her daughter she would look beautiful in a gunnysack, but Katie would argue with her. Katie always argued, and she usually won.

      As Grace sorted through the other outfits they’d selected, she glimpsed the back of a woman in the unforgiving three-way dressing-room mirror. Neglected hair, a double-wide backside, jiggly upper arms. Then Grace straightened up and lifted her arm over her head.

      The pudgy woman did the same.

      She put her arm down.

      So did the woman in the mirror.

      She twitched her hips from side to side.

      So did—

      “Mom, what are you doing?” Katie asked.

      “Contemplating suicide.” Grace laughed to make sure Katie knew she was kidding. She shuddered at the back view of herself in the unflattering fluorescent light. It shouldn’t be such a shock. She knew she’d been getting a little wide in the beam but had managed to avoid taking a hard look in the mirror. Whose hips were those, and why were they so large? How did she get to this state? At some point—she had no idea when—gravity must have kicked in. With no prior warning, she’d turned into a not-very-attractive stranger. But there she was, in living color, the dumpy, middle-aged suburban housewife she never thought she’d become.

      “Is something wrong?” Katie prodded.

      Grace sighed and picked up her purse. “No, sweetie. I don’t know what I was thinking when I put on these khaki shorts.”

      “You look fine,” Katie stated.

      The kids didn’t need for Grace to look like anything but Mom, and she’d done a damned good job of that. When Steve did a good job, he got a medal or pin of commendation. While she got…She wondered why no one ever gave women medals for motherhood.

      “I’m the one in trouble, Mom. Nothing’s right.” With a long-suffering sigh, Katie peeled off the green sweater and tossed it to Grace.

      “What about the hip-hugger jeans?” Grace suggested. “They were cute on you.”

      Katie slipped a T-shirt over her head. “In order to wear hip-huggers, you have to actually have hips.”

      Grace patted her arm. “Trust me, you’ll get them. The Lord will provide.” She avoided her reflection as Katie finished dressing.

      Katie didn’t seem to notice her uncharacteristic silence as they went to find Emma. She was in another dressing room, where she’d put aside a stack of selections to show her mother. As blond and willowy as a prima ballerina, eighteen-year-old Emma never experienced the uncertainties that tortured her younger sister. At the moment, Emma was modeling a jersey skirt and sweater, her natural good looks magically transforming a discount outfit into a Marc Jacobs original.

      Grace smiled at her older daughter. “I see you narrowed your choices down to, what, a few dozen?”

      “Two skirts and three tops, and I’ll kick in for half,” Emma said. She worked as a lifeguard at the Island County Aquatics Center. It turned out to be the perfect place to meet people. After living here just two months, she had plenty of friends.

      “Deal,” Grace agreed. A little extravagance was justified, she supposed. The Navy Exchange provided the basics, but the start of the school year, in a brand-new town, called for some serious retail therapy. Back-to-school shopping usually appealed to Grace. She took a peculiar comfort in the familiar rituals of summer’s end, in getting registered for school, joining the PTA, signing permission forms for sports and extracurriculars. She liked organizing their backpacks and binders, spiral-bound notebooks and bradded folders; she liked putting things in their proper place. Stowing ordnance, Steve called it.

      Shouldering her bulging purse, she stepped outside and, for a moment, forgot where she was. She felt unmoored, disoriented. She had started over so many times in so many new places that she actually had to think for a second before remembering which town this was.

      With Emma at the wheel of their aging station wagon, they headed down the road to a huge Rite Aid. This was Katie’s indulgence. Rather than getting school supplies at the Navy Exchange, she craved the variety available at the big drugstore. Under the bluish glare of fluorescent lights, the back-to-school aisle was jammed with harried mothers and restless kids. Emma wandered over to the makeup section, leaving Grace to pick out the basic necessities. Neither of the twins had ever been picky about their school supplies.

      On the other hand, Katie took the task seriously and was presently weighing the merits of disposable versus refillable mechanical pencils. Waiting at the end

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