Page 62 of Dear Henry, Love Edith
“There was a bit of a wiggle.”
“And I didn’t set you up. I just wasn’t sure if you wanted me to keep talking about it or not.”
“Why wouldn’t I want you to keep talking about it?” Henry leaned down and grabbed a baseball.
“I don’t know. It might be boring to you.”
“Is it boring to you?”
“No.”
Henry looked down to the ball in his hand, tossing it lightly a few times in his palm, before meeting her gaze again. “Then it’s not boring to me, Edith.” His voice had lowered in the same manner as the sunlight. Slowly. Softly. Like they were sitting at a private table for two, rather than standing out on a muggy mosquito-infested baseball diamond. How did he do that?
“So what was it?”
Edith stared at Henry. “What was what?”
“The story.”
She blinked and tugged her shirt away from her stomach, needing a quick breeze. “Right. The story.”
Edith spun toward the fence and started retrieving balls. “The summer right after she graduated with her medical degree, her grandparents took her on a trip to Africa under the guise of a graduation gift. Really they were trying to get her away from medicine and convince her to marry a wealthy friend of the family. He was supposed tojust happen uponthem and join their little caravan for the summer.”
Edith used the bottom of her shirt like a sack to carry the balls to the mound and dumped them into the bag. “Nicely done,” Henry said when most of them bounced off the bag and scattered in different directions.
Since he made no move to get them, instead sitting down on the pitcher’s mound, Edith did the same. “So what happened?” he asked.
“What happened?” Edith smiled, remembering the way her great-great-aunt would recount the night that changed her life. “They went on a safari and somehow she got separated from everybody. One of those things where one group thought she was with the other group, and the other group thought she was with the first group. And she suddenly found herself alone. For an entire night. In the wilds of South Africa.”
“Sounds scary.”
“She was terrified. She said it felt like the night would never end. So she just kept moving. Even though it didn’t make sense, she thought if she kept walking, she could somehow get to the morning faster.”
“I can’t explain it, little Edith. I just knew I couldn’t let myself get stuck in the darkness. I knew it would kill me. So I kept walking. I kept searching for that first glimmer of light.”
“Right before dawn broke, she was so lost she thought nobody would ever find her and if they did, it would be her bones after they’d been picked clean by a pack of lions.” Edith held her finger up, the way her namesake used to at this point in the story. “But just as she was about to give up, the first tiny gleam of dawn crested over the horizon. And a softly singing choir of angels beckoned her to keep walking. Just a little farther.”
“A choir of angels?”
“A softly singing choir. Get it right.”
“My apologies.” Henry’s foot tapped her foot. It had gotten dark enough now she couldn’t see his eyes beneath the brim of his baseball hat, but she didn’t have to see them to know they were crinkling the way they always did when he smiled.
“But they were angels?” he asked.
“Well... not exactly. The choir turned out to be a group of village women gathering water. But when my great-great-aunt followed the sound, she walked down a tunnel of trees, the end looking like a big arch. And when she stepped through the arch and saw them singing beneath the first rays of daylight, they may as well have been angels. She said it was like stepping into a new life. She knew in that moment exactly what she was meant to do. She spent the next decades of her life using her medical background to do missions work all over the world.”
“Wow.”
“I know. Isn’t it a great story?” Edith rose to her feet and used her palms to swipe the dirt off her rear end. “That’s what I want more than anything.” Edith held out her handto help Henry up, his knee making the task a little more difficult. “That one story. That one adventure. Something that I can look back on and saythere. The moment my life set off on a new trajectory. The moment I answered my calling. The moment my life really started to matter.”
“Edith—”
“I know my life already matters, you don’t have to say that, but...” Edith looked down at his hand still clasped around hers. “My life doesn’t have a great story yet.”
She dropped his hand and took a step back. Standing close to him on the pitcher’s mound reminded her too much of dancing with him on the putting green. Reminded her too much of how his arms felt.
She needed to go. Before she grew any more tempted to stay. Before she repeated the same mistake she made with Brian. Giving up her dreams for love. Not that she loved Henry.
