Free The Accidental Book Club by Jennifer Scott Page B

the end of it. “We want to give them time. To say . . .” G
ood-bye. Give them time to say good-bye.
But her throat wouldn’t let the word out.
    “But I don’t want it to be just months, Jeanie,” Wayne had said, and he’d sounded almost like a little boy rather than the fearless man she’d known and loved for decades. She’d reached out under the covers and touched his hand.
    “I know,” she said. “Neither do I.” And she’d swallowed and swallowed because she didn’t want to cry in front of him. She didn’t want his fears confirmed, that he would leave her broken and alone. She’d wanted him to feel she could take his death. That she could handle it and be okay. She wanted to gift him that peace.
    They’d called both kids the next evening on the speakerphone. Wayne had told them himself, breaking down halfway through the sentence each time. Kenneth had cried like a baby, had blubbered on about how his dad was a fighter and he could beat this. Laura had sounded distant, distracted, as if not really taking in the news.
    “Whoa, that’s rough,” she’d said. “How long?”
    Wayne had squeezed his eyes shut. “They’re saying not very, I’m afraid. I’d like to see Bailey soon.”
    “Sure, yeah,” she’d said, but in a very
yes, dear
sort of way. “Wow. Cancer. You’re what, sixty-seven?”
    “Yes,” Wayne had answered.
    “A hundred years ago, you would’ve been thought of as an extremely old man,” she’d said. “For what it’s worth.”
    Wayne had glanced at Jean and then frowned, a perplexed crease between his eyebrows. “I suppose you’re right,” was all he’d said.
    That’s Laura,
Jean had told Wayne when they hung up.
That’s her way of dealing with hard stuff. You know how she is. If she can’t solve it, she doesn’t know what to do with it.
    But given events of the past couple of weeks, Jean couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Laura had been drunk that night too.
    And now look at her. Sitting in a rehab center out in a St. Louis suburb somewhere, fighting with her husband, fighting with her daughter, fighting with bill collectors, fighting to keep her job. So much fighting.
    Jean wondered now if Laura was feeling like she had felt back when Wayne was diagnosed, back when he first got sick. She wondered if Laura felt like she was swimming and swimming, taking in water with each choking breath, but never getting anywhere. She wondered if she felt jellyfish stinging her gut and sharks nipping at her heels, prodding her to go on, to hurry up, to get on top of things. She wondered if that was why Laura had gotten to where she was right now—just trying to get out of the damn ocean. Just trying to get to the beach where she could dry off and get her wits about her.
    Not that it mattered. You could lose control, but that didn’t mean you got to check out of your life. It didn’t mean you let your teen daughter drown because you couldn’t hack the temperature of the water.
    Jean decided not to read any more aloud after all. She laid the book in her lap and leaned her head back against the sofa cushion, closed her eyes, imagined what Wayne’s reaction to the Thackeray book would have been.
Jeanie,
she could hear him say,
I’m trying to find a greater truth here. There has to be a life truth he’s trying to reflect back at us with this.
How Wayne had always done that—tried to find more in the books they read than was actually there. He’d felt so strongly about not only reading them, but also learning from them. She’d once joked that he could find a greater life truth in a Dr. Seuss book, so what had he done? Come home from the library with a Dr. Seuss book and dissected it for her, page after silly page.
You see, Jeanie, this book is, at its core, about courage in the face of adversity,
he’d said.
It’s actually very sophisticated.
And then he’d started the book over, reading in the voice of a Shakespearean actor. He’d had her laughing so hard by the end of