The thought that she was now a widow before her twenty-ninth birthday struck Celia as utterly absurd. Widow, the word sounded so archaic. It rattled in her head. It had to be true, she knew, but the word fell short of expressing the dislocation she felt. Living in limbo here in a dingy, upstairs bedsit in the house of her cousin, Charlie. She sat staring at the documents on her desk. A scrap of coffee-stained paper clung to the back of a gas bill. She prised it loose. As she deciphered the smudged, handwritten words she recalled the day she’d written them; on the day before she locked up her house and left.
The yoke of loss grips firm around my shoulders
In my imagining I watch you stepping from the sea
Beneath the Weeping Cherry tree above the basalt boulders
I remember tasting the salt on your lips that day
You took my hand and we lay there lost in wonder
As the cherry petals showered from the tree…
More lines captured the memories of a holiday with Clive at a beach house, ending with the sadness of today. Wiping her tears Celia read the words over and over, as if to convince herself of the truth of them. Copying the poem into her notebook she placed it to one side and reached into a cardboard box by her feet. From the jumble of stationery she retrieved a roll of sticky tape and moved to fasten the most urgent bills to the windowsill.
Standing there for a moment she gazed pensively through the fly specked panes, thinking of the difficult trip from Bannockburn. She had almost wiped out a small family of ducks crossing the road in front of her…thinking of Clive, feeling hurt and angry about the way he’d left her. How could he do such a dreadful thing.
Hitting the brakes hard like that had sent her old Corolla slewing sideways, groaning with the weight of the load. It was a wake-up call and fortunate that the country road was deserted. She wanted no further heartache, not on these roads, not anywhere.
Her anger still simmered as she threw the roll of tape back into the box where it promptly bounced out again. As she bent to retrieve it she exhaled the useless anger from her chest, remembering Clive’s warmth and compassion. Ambivalent feelings about Clive tormented her.
In recent months, before tragedy struck, her mother had joined the household. Failing health prompted the move. Her life was now changed immeasurably. Celia thought about it every day. Ruth was living with advancing dementia at Summerleigh Community Care.
Mortgage payments and memories deemed it impossible for Celia to keep her family home. Charlie’s mother, her Aunt Eula, had passed on his offer of the bedsit. Why he didn’t contact her directly was puzzling. Maybe, like a lot of others, he felt awkward, didn’t know what to say under the circumstances. Confirming her arrival date for early April Celia was mindful of his closing words.
‘On a temporary basis of course…until you get back on your feet.’
Accommodation in her cousin’s house would incur no rent. At least Charlie had been clear about that.
"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." — Joseph Addison
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