Free The Sea Glass Sisters by Lisa Wingate Page B

I know that Aunt Sandy wouldn’t be selling the land in Michigan if she and Uncle George weren’t already tapped out from the last storm recovery.
    I help her clear driftwood away from the front door. We pile it near the porch steps. The collection looks almost like art, if you don’t think about what it is and how it got there.
    The scent of the air slipping from the building answers the looming question even before we loosen the last of the latches and move the shutter away from the door. It smells like our clothes washer when one of the kids throws in a load and forgets about it for a couple days. In a flash, I wonder if anyone is taking care of the laundry at home. How are they faring without me? Am I really as unneeded as I sometimes feel these days? Probably not. I know that’s the truth of it.
    I think about what Aunt Sandy said to me in the Jeep, about making the leap to a new phase and it all being part of the plan. Parenthood is the only career in which the better you do your job, the sooner you’re fired.
    I’ll have to share that with Carol when I’m back at work. The thought makes me smile for about half a second, before I catch a glimpse through the glass door into Sandy’s Seashell Shop.
    My aunt grabs a breath and lets it out through pursed lips. Her shoulders square before she turns the knob. “No point avoiding reality. It is what it is.” As she pushes it open, the door catches on a soggy floor mat we forgot to pick up. It’s the first thing she grabs when she’s able to squeeze partway inside. The drips create a waterfall as she hands off the mat and tells me to throw it over the porch railing. “Gotta start somewhere. That’s the only thing you can do with a mess. Start cleaning it up, a little at a time.”
    Inside, the shop not only smells like mildew already, but it is a mess. The water reached over two feet high in here, swamping the old plank floors and the antique wooden beadboard around the lower parts of the walls. The moisture has seeped upward into the drywall above the wainscoting, drawing uneven mountainscapes in dirty shades of brown and gray.
    “We just got all that fixed.” Tears sparkle in Aunt Sandy’s eyes, and she blinks rapidly, trying to deny them. “One season. One. That’s all we got out of the repairs we spent so much money on before a storm hit again. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”
    “No, it doesn’t.”
    She pulls another breath, then puckers up and kisses the air on its way out. “Then again, this day is already a blessing.” As she echoes my earlier thought, a smile spreads from one side of her face to the other, dimpling her round cheeks and spilling the tears over. “You saved a life today.”
    “ We saved a life today.” Through all the gloom and the smell of newly forming mildew and the merchandise that has tumbled to the ground and been covered by the slime, an incredible light falls over me.
    “Divine providence.” Aunt Sandy gives the events a name and an author.
    She picks up a muck-covered glass box that has inexplicably been left sitting in the middle of the floor. We stand there and smile at each other as she fingers the lighthouse ornaments atop the box, and the moment could not be more perfect. It’s odd when I think back on the events of the past week and a half—the unpredictable, uneven chain that began with the frantic call about little Emily’s disappearance and eventually led us here today. The fruitless searches, the nightmares, the trip to the Outer Banks, the storm, the woman running toward the road today with her toddler limp in her arms . . .
    The shadow of the highest evil intermingled with the light of the highest good. Maybe all lives are filled with this. Maybe it is always a choice between embracing the darkness of one or the saving grace of the other.
    I ponder the strangeness of it all as I try to keep Aunt Sandy from straining herself physically, but of course she insists on doing it anyway. I have no choice