Page 52 of Songs for Libby

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I’d learned a few years ago that if I was going to cook, I had to have music on. Sure, it might have distracted me enough that things had burned a time or two, but it also gave me patience. If I could dance around the kitchen while I cooked, the work didn’t seem nearly as mundane.

I stirred the sauce that was simmering, shaking my head back and forth as I sang along to my music. I danced over to the pantry and when I came out, I noticed my husband leaning against the counter, watching me with a grin.

I shook my head, smiling and wondering how long he’d been watching me. Then I waved him over and it was his turn to roll his eyes, but he obeyed my summons and came to dance with me. His kitchen-dancing moves could kindly be described as “dad moves,” and he embraced that fact, hamming it up and pulling ridiculous faces.

“Welcome home, Dr. Caster,” I said as I shimmied back to the stove.

“Mm,” he murmured in my ear as he peered over my shoulder to see what I was cooking. “Thank you, Mrs. Caster.” He dropped a kiss on my neck. “This smells good.”

“That is always the right answer.”

He chuckled. “It also has the benefit of being true.”

♪♫♪

Jonas had proposed two years after we’d met. We had been married on his parents’ ranch in Vermont under a pergola dripping in grapevines. My dress was covered in lace. My auburn hair was curled and gathered to one side, hanging over my shoulder. Naomi did my makeup and stood beside me.

The only damper on the day was remembering how I’d joked for years about having Sean as my man of honor when I got married. Instead, he wasn’t even there.

My father walked me down the grassy aisle while one of Jonas’s nieces carried my train. In honor of our evenings dancing at Roy’s, we hired a live country band to play at our reception. The groom’s cake was decorated with fuchsia and gray cowboy hats on top, a joke that only we appreciated.

We spent our honeymoon in the Mexican Riviera. We swam in the ocean, went zip-lining and four-wheeling, and watched the sun set on the water each evening.

The way Jonas loved me was all-encompassing. His love language was words, and he was so good at using them. He spoke compliments when they came into his head; he encouraged me as a natural course of life instead of something he had to remember to do. He taught me through example that saying “thank you” means something, and it should be said often. In turn, I taught him that sometimes words aren’t enough, and action is required.

He received his master’s almost a year after we were married. We worked together setting up a little practice that he ran out of a treatment room he rented in a chiropractic office. We relied on my income and our savings to help us stay afloat. We had struggled, but it had made us stronger.

Jonas had that effect on me. He’d made me stronger. Or maybe it was that he’d helped me realize my own strength.

A strength that had been tested less than two years after we got married.

♪♫♪

Jonas and I had been traveling, taking a long weekend in Boston when I got the phone call.

My dad was gone. Dead. A massive heart attack. The crushing pain that filled my chest made me wonder if I was going to follow in his footsteps.

As I swooped down into the all-consuming grief, Jonas held me up, calling me back from the darkness.

I remember sitting across from the funeral home director, feeling empty and detached. I recognized that the director was good at her job. She was sympathetic without involving herself in my emotions. She laid out my options and walked us through every decision step by step, then she assured us that everything would be taken care of and sent us on our way.

I walked out with Jonas’s hand holding mine. He opened the car door for me and reminded me to buckle my seatbelt.

Lying in bed, trying to sleep, three days after the funeral, I thought of all that I’d lost. My mother, my father, Serena, Sean. A small epiphany hit me. If I had stood by Sean, if I had prioritized him and let Jonas go, there would have been no one to hold me up in these moments. Sean would have tried, but deep down I knew that he wouldn’t have been strong enough.

It was a strange thing to be in a cloud of grief and know that the heartache of walking away from Sean had been worth it.

I had known that intellectually for a long time. But feeling the truth of it was different. There was a peace that came with that clarity, but also a wave of sadness. Knowing that I was better off without him still hurt. Especially when I considered the list of people that I had lost. Sean may not be dead, but I had lost him.

My father’s death required that I acclimate to a new normal. A normal where my father’s voice didn’t call me Blue Eyes.

My grief felt bipolar. One moment the sadness would overwhelm me without warning and I could barely move. Other times I was able to march confidently into my life and carry on as if nothing was amiss. Not that the pain was gone during that time. It wasn’t. But it was…compartmentalized. It was put away in a manageable box that didn’t disrupt my day. Sometimes that feeling lasted hours, sometimes days.

Once my father passed away, my last real ties to New York had been severed. Jonas and I had struggled for more than a year to keep his acupuncture practice in Newburgh going, but when Jonas was contacted by a buddy he’d gone to school with, offering him a partnership in North Carolina, it had been an easy decision.

With my father gone and my constant need to maintain both physical and emotional distance from Sean, I had been perfectly happy to go wherever Jonas wanted to go.