Bitter Sweet

By the same author

SPRING FANCY

MORNING GLORY

THE HELLION

VOWS

THE GAMBLE A HEART SPEAKS

YEARS

SEPARATE BEDS

TWICE LOVED

HUMMINGBIRD

THE ENDEARMENT

THE FULFILMENT

FORGIVING

NOVEMBER OF THE HEART FAMILY BLESSINGS

Bitter Sweet

This edition published by Grafton Books, 1999

Grafton Books is an Imprint of HarperCollinsPMWfs/*m

First published in
Great Britain
by Grafton Books 1991

Copyright © LaVyrle Spencer 1990

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

ISBN 0-261-67190-1

Printed and bound in
Great Britain
by Mackays of Chatham PLC,
Chatham
,
Kent

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

My thanks to the following people for their help during the research of this book:

Christine and Sverre Falck-Pedersen of Thorp House Inn, Fish Creek,

Wisconsin

Captain Paul of Captain Paul’s Charter Fishing Fleet, Gills Rock,
Wisconsin

Fellow writer, Pamela Smith of Seattle, Washington L.S.

This book is dedicated to my school friends who have remained friends for life.

. .

Dodie Fread Nelson

Carol Judd Cameron

Carol Robinson Shequin

Judean Peterson Longbella

Nancy Thorn Rebischke

and

Nancy Norgren

With love and fond memories of all the good times, Berle

And in my thoughts often during the writing of this book were school friends with whom I’ve lost touch long ago, but who linger in memory. Lona Hess . . . Timothy Bergein . . . Gaylord Olson . . . Sharon Naslund . . . Sue Staley . . . Ann Stangland . . . Janie Johnson . . . Keith Peters

Where did you go?

The room held a small refrigerator stocked with apple juice and soft drinks, a two-burner hot plate, a phonograph, a circle of worn, comfortable chairs and a smeared green chalkboard that said, GRIEF GROUP 2:00-3:00.

Maggie Stearn entered with five minutes to spare, hung up her raincoat and helped herself to a tea bag and hot water. Bobbing the bag in the Styrofoam cup, she ambled across the room.

At the window she looked down. On the ship canal below, the water, pocked by the first of the August monsoons, seemed brooding and oily. The buildings of
Seattle
registered only in memory while
Puget Sound
hid behind a rainy curtain of grey. A rust-streaked tanker lumbered along the murky canal, ocean-bound, its rails and navigational aerials obscured by the downpour. On its weather stained deck merchant marines stood motionless -blurred yellow blobs wrapped head to hip in oilskin slickers.

Rain. So much rain, and the entire winter of it ahead.

She sighed, thinking of facing it alone, and turned from the window just as two other members of the group arrived.

‘Hi, Maggie’, they said in unison from the door: Diane, thirty-six, whose husband had died when a blood vessel burst in his brain while they were clamming on Whidbay Island with their three kids; and Nelda, sixty-two, whose husband fell from a roof he was shingling and never got up again.

Without Diane and Nelda, Maggie wasn’t sure how she’d have survived this last year.

Crossing the room, Diane asked, ‘How did the date go?’

Maggie grimaced. ‘Don’t ask.’

‘That bad, huh?’

‘How do you get over feeling married when you’re not anymore?’ It was a question all of them were striving to answer.

‘I know what you mean,’ Nelda put in. ‘I finally went to bingo with George - you remember, I told you about him, the man from my church? All night long I felt like I was cheating on Lou. Playing bingo, mind you!’

While they commiserated, a man joined them, thin and balding, in his late fifties, wearing unfashionable pleated pants and a decrepit sweater that hung on his bony frame.

‘Hi, Cliff.’ They widened their circle to let him in.

Cliff nodded. He was the newest member of the group. His wife had died when she ran a red light during her first time out driving after carotid surgery that had left her with no peripheral vision.

‘How was your week?’ Maggie asked him.

‘Oh . . .’ The word came out with a sigh and a shrug, but he offered no more.

Maggie rubbed his back. ‘Some weeks are better than others. It takes time.’ She’d had her own back rubbed more than once in this room and knew the healing power of a human touch.

‘What about you?’ Nelda turned the focus on Maggie. ‘Your daughter leaves for college this week, right?’

‘Yup,’ Maggie replied with false brightness. ‘Two more days.’

‘I’ve been through that with three of my own. You call if it gets rough, will you? We’ll go out and see some male strippers or something.’

Maggie laughed. Nelda would no more go see a stripper than she would become one herself. ‘I wouldn’t even know what to do with a stripped male anymore.’ All of them laughed. It was easier to laugh about the dearth of sex in their lives than it was to do something about it.

Dr Feldstein walked in, a clipboard in one hand and a mug of steaming coffee in the other, talking with Claire, who’d lost her sixteen-year-old daughter in a motorcycle accident. Amid an exchange of greetings Dr Feldstein shut the door and headed for his favourite chair, setting his coffee on a nearby table.

‘Looks like everyone’s here. Let’s get started.’

They all took seats, conversation trailing off, a group of healing people who cared about one another. Maggie sat on the brown sofa between Cliff and Nelda, Diane on the floor on a fat blue cushion and Claire in a chair to Dr Feldstein’s right.

It was Maggie who noted the absence. Glancing around she asked, ‘Shouldn’t we wait for Tammi?’ Tammi was their youngest, only twenty, unmarried, pregnant, abandoned by the father of the baby and struggling to overcome the recent loss of both of her parents. Tammi was everybody’s darling, a surrogate daughter to everyone in the group.

Dr Feldstein set his clipboard on the floor and replied, ‘Tammi won’t be with us today.’

Every eye fixed on him but nobody asked.

With his elbows resting on the wooden arms of his chair, Dr Feldstein linked his hands over his stomach.

‘Tammi took an overdose of sleeping pills two days ago and she’s still in intensive care. We’re going to be dealing with that today.’

The shock hit them full force, stunning them into silence. Maggie felt it explode like a small bomb in her stomach and spread to her extremities. She stared at the doctor with his long, intelligent face, slightly hooked nose and full, cranberry-coloured lips within a thick black beard. His eyes touched every member of the group - shrewd black eyes with flat violet planes beneath - watching their reaction.

v,d;l;ac J,HaJJy oroKc cflC sncnce to ask what they were all wondering. ‘Will she live?’

‘We don’t know that yet. She’s developed Tylcnol poisoning so it’s touch and go.’

From outside came the faint bellow of a foghorn on the ship canal below. Inside, the group sat motionless, their tears beginning to build.

Claire leapt to her feet and stormed to the window, thumping the ledge with both fists.

‘Goddamn it! Why did she do it!’

‘Why didn’t she call one of us?’ Maggie asked. ‘We would have helped her.’

They’d struggled with it before - the helplessness, the anger in the face of that helplessness. Every person in the circle felt the same, for a setback suffered by one of them was a setback suffered by all. They had invested time and tears in each other, had trusted each other with their innermost hurts and fears. To think they could work this hard and have it backfire was tantamount to being betrayed.

Cliff sat motionless, blinking hard.

Diane sniffed and lowered her forehead to her updrawn knees.

Dr Feldstein reached behind his chair and snagged a box of Kleenex from the top of the phonograph, stretched to place it on the table in the middle of the circle.

‘All right, let’s start with the basics,’ he said in a no- nonsense tone. ‘If she chose not to call any of us, there was no way we could have helped her.’

‘But she is us,’ Margaret reasoned, spreading her hands. ‘I mean, we’re all striving for the same things here, aren’t we? And we thought we were making headway.’

“And if she could do it, none of you are safe, right?’ Dr Feldstein demanded before answering his own question. ‘Wrong! That’s the first thing I want to fix in your minds. Tammi made a choice. Each of you makes choices every day. It’s all right for you to be angry that she’s done this, but it’s not all right to see yourself in her place.’

They talked about it, a long discussion filled with passion and compassion, that grew more animated as it lengthened. They worked past their anger until it became pity, and past the pity until it became renewed ardour to do all they could to make their own lives better. When they’d worked through their feelings, Dr Feldstein announced, ‘We’re going to do an exercise today, something I believe each of you is ready for. If you’re not, you only have to pass - no questions asked. But for those of you who want to turn around that feeling of helplessness you’ve experienced because of Tammi’s suicide attempt, I believe it will help.’

He rose and placed a hard wooden chair in the centre of the room. ‘We’re going to say good-bye today to someone or something that has hindered our getting better. Someone who’s left us through death, or maybe voluntarily, or something we haven’t been able to face. It could be someplace we haven’t been able to go or an old grudge we’ve carried around for too long. Whatever it is, we’re going to put it in that chair and say good-bye to it aloud. And when we’ve said good-bye, we’re going to let that person or that thing know what we’re going to do now to make ourselves happier. Do you all understand?” When nobody replied, Dr Feldstein said, ‘I’ll be first.’