“What in the—”
I cut Ryan off. “Did she say anything else?”
Bradley gives me a shrug. “No—oh, yeah. She said to tell you that she got to hold my hand.”
“April?” Ryan asks, touching my shoulder.
I stand up and look around, down the rain-slicked streets, searching the shadows for one that is familiar. Mom? When I see nothing, I close my eyes and draw up images, the ones I’ve kept inside glass for so long. Surprisingly, they don’t shatter and break and cut me with their sharp edges. The one that is clearest is of my thirteenth birthday party, when she carried a pink cake into the dining room. The other, darker images of her last days feel as far away as another continent.
I love you, Mom.
The leaves answer me, a whisper-soft sound that will stay with me for the rest of my life. In their sandpapery dry echo, I hear her voice, the voice I’ve longed to hear for years. I only wanted you to be happy.
I know.
“April?” Ryan says my name softly, but I can’t answer, not now when I am laughing and crying at the same time. I hold on to their hands, my husband’s and my son’s, and in the warm press of their flesh, I feel connected and complete. I am a twenty-seven-year-old housewife with no formal education, living in a house that was put together in a factory somewhere, and yet I know now that it is more than enough. It is everything.
St. Martin’s Press
THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. ALL OF THE CHARACTERS, ORGANIZATIONS, AND EVENTS PORTRAYED IN THIS STORY ARE EITHER PRODUCTS OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY.
“The Glass Case.”
Copyright ? 1998 by Kristin Hannah.
First published by Signet, an imprint of Dutton NAL, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. in MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS, Celebrating the Gift of Love with 12 New Stories. Copyright @ Jill Morgan, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg, 1998.
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Part One
From a Distance
There are some things you learn best in calm,
some in storm.
—WILLA CATHER
Prologue
1982
The way she saw it, some families were like well-tended parks, with pretty daffodil borders and big, sprawling trees that offered respite from the summer sun. Others— and this she knew firsthand— were battlefields, bloody and dark, littered with shrapnel and body parts.
She might only be seventeen, but Jolene Larsen already knew about war. She’d grown up in the midst of a marriage gone bad.
Valentine’s Day was the worst. The mood at home was always precarious, but on this day, when the television ran ads for flowers and chocolates and red foil hearts, love became a weapon in her parents’ careless hands. It started with their drinking, of course. Always. Glasses full of bourbon, refilled again and again. That was the beginning. Then came the screaming and the crying, the throwing of things. For years, Jolene had asked her mother why they didn’t just leave him— her father— and steal away in the night. Her mother’s answer was always the same: I can’t. I love him. Sometimes she would cry as she said the terrible words, sometimes her bitterness would be palpable, but in the end it didn’t matter how she sounded; what mattered was the tragic truth of her one-sided love.
Downstairs, someone screamed.
That would be Mom.