The Beginning: An eShort Prequel to the Bridge (5 page)

BOOK: The Beginning: An eShort Prequel to the Bridge
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After three days of reading, Edna sat beside Beth and watched her tender musical heart gracefully begin to slip away. When Beth drew her last breath, Edna wept uncontrollably, the way she had given way to sobs after Tom’s death. Questions railed against her soul. Why did people have to die? And why was it always the good ones, the kind ones like Beth and Tom? Why didn’t God take the liars and crooks first? She mourned with the March family, and somehow she felt they were mourning with her, too. Not only mourning their Beth.

But mourning Edna’s Tom. The whole March family.

At first she was angry at Donna for giving her the book. How could it ever be time to immerse herself in such a sad story? For a week she avoided The Bridge, avoided telling Donna how far back reading
Little Women
had set her. But the story stayed in her heart, calling to her, and a day after she finished it, she read it again. Faster this time. And one late night she came upon a line that took her breath away. Like a lightbulb turning on in Edna’s soul, something happened inside her. She read the line over and over again.

Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.

Suddenly Edna knew without any doubt that it had been like this for Tom. He had taken her love with him, and so when death called, he had been able to go. The God he loved had called him home, and he had gone easily. Because he could take Edna’s love with him.

She closed the book and walked to her bedside table where she still kept Tom’s T-shirt. It felt soft in her hands, and she pressed it to her face. She hadn’t slept with it in a while. Whatever book she read at night had replaced her need for it. But now . . . now she breathed in the faint smell of him again. And deep inside her she felt the gaping wounds of losing him begin to heal.

Tom still loved her. He carried her love with him.

The next day she went to the department store and picked out a beautiful scrapbook. One with a textured canvas cover and a space in the middle for a single photo. Edna knew just the one that would work for the gift. Borrowing a camera from the owner of the mercantile, she took three pictures of The Bridge. She still didn’t go inside. That could wait until she finished putting together the gift.

When she picked up the finished prints, she chose one that seemed to capture the bookstore better than the others. She placed it carefully in the framed window at the center of the scrapbook cover and smoothed her hand over it.

Perfect.

Next, she opened the cover, and on the inside flap she wrote:

Donna . . . Fill this book with the stories of old souls like me. People who sometimes need a place like this to bridge yesterday and tomorrow. People looking for a second chance. Thank you!

She wrapped the gift and the next day she took it to The Bridge.

CHAPTER EIGHT

E
dna was a little concerned.

So much time had passed since she’d been to The Bridge that she wondered if Donna might be cool with her, distant. But as she stepped inside the bookstore, the shopkeeper’s smile was the first thing she saw. Immediately, Donna came from behind the counter and hugged her. For a long time she looked in her eyes, as if she were checking Edna’s heart for fresh scars. “You read it.”

“I did.” Edna handed her the wrapped scrapbook. “This is for you.” She hesitated. “Before you open it . . . can we talk?”

Donna only smiled and poured them each a cup of coffee. “I was expecting this.”

How the young shopkeeper was so wise, Edna could only imagine. But as she took her cup of coffee and sat again with Donna on the sofa, her entire story spilled from her heart. They both cried when she got to the part about the doorbell ringing. When she finished, she looked at Donna for a long time. “You knew.”

“Yes. God told me you needed that book.”

Edna narrowed her eyes, puzzled. “God?” Not since Tom had she met someone who talked about the Lord like He was her friend. But He must have told Donna. The healing that had started in Edna’s heart made it impossible to question her friend’s certainty.

“Our faith and this store . . . that’s how we survived.” Donna gave Edna a lingering side hug. “We prayed we’d meet people like you. Hurting people who needed God and a good book. So they’d have a chance to survive.”

“People like me.” Edna understood now.

“Exactly.”

“After that day, October fifth, I didn’t think I’d survive. I thought—”

“Wait.” Donna stared at her. “October fifth?”

“Yes. The day I got the news about Tom.”

“Edna . . . that’s the same day . . . the day our little girl died.”

The truth of that took a long time to settle in, and for a good bit they were quiet, the air around them almost holy. Edna drank her coffee, marveling over the mystery and about Donna’s prayer and how God had answered it. She nodded to the package. “You can open it now.”

“You didn’t have to . . .”

“I wanted to do more.”

Donna gingerly ripped the paper from the gift, and for a long time she just stared at the cover. She ran her fingertips over the photo, and after a few seconds one tear and then another hit the canvas.

“It’s a scrapbook . . . I wrote you something inside.”

Donna opened the cover carefully, and Edna watched her read the inscription. Finally she lifted teary eyes to Edna, and again she leaned close and hugged her. “Thank you. We don’t have anything like this. A way to track the names and faces God brings through the door.”

Edna couldn’t help but think that in some ways the scrapbook would take the place of the baby books and yearbooks and family photo albums Donna and Charlie would never have. Donna seemed to be thinking the same thing, because once more she looked at the cover, and then she thumbed her way through the empty pages, as if she could see the way they might be filled in the years and decades to come.

“It needs one thing. A picture of you beneath what you wrote.” Donna set her coffee cup down on an end table and hurried back toward the register. She pulled a camera from one of the adjacent cupboards. “Do you have your book?
Little Women
?”

Edna grinned. “In my purse.” She took it with her everywhere. Already she was on her third time through it.

“Let’s see.” Donna surveyed the area. “Stay there. This is perfect. The light from the back window is straight on you.” Her tone was lighter, more full of life. “Hold your book like you’re reading it.”

The woman’s enthusiasm was contagious. Edna found her copy of
Little Women
, crossed her legs, and held the novel open on her lap, opened to her favorite page, her favorite quote. It was the only one with the corner of the page bent over.

Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.

She felt a sad smile fill her heart and move to her lips. The quote would stay with her always. As she looked at it, she didn’t hear Donna taking the picture until it was over.

“There. Years from now when I’m an old lady, that picture . . . that’s how I’ll always remember you, Edna.”

“Donna, you won’t need to remember me. I’ll still be sitting in that chair reading whatever book you put in my hands.”

Donna held up the camera. “I like that picture even better than the one I just took.”

The next half hour passed quickly, and Edna had to get to work. When she stopped in a few days later, the scrapbook was on the counter for everyone to see. And the photograph Donna had taken was pasted in the scrapbook right where she said she was going to put it: beneath Edna’s words.

Edna had a feeling that someday when she looked back, the scrapbook—and the picture of herself with her precious copy of
Little Women
—would mean as much to her as it would to Donna. Suddenly a realization hit her, one that filled her with indescribable joy.

She had just now been thinking about the future! Not tomorrow or next week. But years from now. Thinking about it without fear or worry or dread. And without wondering how she was going to survive without Tom Carlton. Which could only mean one thing: Though she would never stop missing her husband, she was healing.

She was going to make it.

Because of the Bartons and The Bridge and a handful of books including one that her friend, Donna, had somehow known she needed. The one God wanted her to read.

Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women.

Donna waited until Edna was gone before she called Charlie to the front of the store. He loved the scrapbook as much as she did, but he hadn’t seen the developed picture of Edna yet.

“Look at this.” Donna motioned Charlie to her side. “Our first photograph in the scrapbook.” She opened the front cover and showed him her work.

“Hmmm.” Charlie leaned closer. “That’s her, all right. The look in her eyes . . . like she’s captured by the story.”

“She was.” Donna smiled at the picture of her new friend. “She didn’t hear me click the camera.”

“Fills my heart, Donna . . . This is what we wanted with The Bridge.”

“Yes.” She turned to him and put her hands on his shoulders. “You’re a brilliant businessman, Charlie. Your father was wrong.”

Gratitude shone in his eyes. “I love you.”

She leaned close and kissed him. “You were born for this.”

“We both were.”

For a few seconds they were quiet, and Donna wondered if, like her, he was thinking about their little girl. “Say something.”

“I don’t cry in the early morning anymore. Thinking about her.”

“Charlie . . .” She framed his face with her hand, his cheek rough against her fingers. “I thought I was the only one.”

“I saw her, Donna. I held her little body.” He clenched his jaw, clearly fighting a fresh kind of sadness. “I’ll always miss her.”

They swayed a little, drawing strength from each other, from a love deeper than most. Charlie looked down at the scrapbook. “You know what I think when I see that book . . . those empty pages?” He linked his arms gently around her waist. “I think about all the faces we’re yet to meet, the people who will come through the doors. Folks who need a good book and someone who cares.”

“God will bring them. He brought Edna.”

“Yes, He did.” This time he kissed her, more slowly than before. “Thank you, Donna . . . for believing in me.”

“Always, Charlie . . .” She put her head on his chest and held onto him. The way she would as long as she lived. “Always.”

With that, Charlie whispered a prayer. He thanked God for His faithfulness, and he asked Him to keep the doors of The Bridge open for many, many decades. Charlie closed by asking that the Lord might bring people who needed something to get them from the pain of yesterday to the possibility of tomorrow. People who needed God and the two of them. And the miracle of a small-town bookstore.

So that some far-off day the scrapbook would no longer be empty.

It would be overflowing.

An excerpt from
The Bridge

CHAPTER ONE

S
he should have said something.

Even now, seven years later, with Thanksgiving dishes put away and another lonely December rushing up at her, Molly Allen knew the truth. Her year, her life, her Christmas . . . all of it might be different if only she’d said something.

BOOK: The Beginning: An eShort Prequel to the Bridge
5.94Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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