Read Online The Family Beach House by Holly Chamberlin - Free Book Online

someday Jon might want to wear it, if he decided to get married, that was. Of course, she had not expressed that hope to her son. That would seem like pressure. She didn’t want to presume anything about the lives of her children. Maybe Jon wouldn’t want to marry. Maybe Jane wouldn’t either. Maybe she would never have grandchildren.
    Tilda sighed. She knew she was indulging in self-pity, more than ever lately, and she knew it was an unattractive quality, but she just couldn’t seem to stop it. After all, she had been virtually dumped by the majority of their couple friends. She wanted to tell them that death was not contagious. “I don’t have a taint on me,” she wanted to say. Frank’s cancer wasn’t an infectious plague. Or was it that some people didn’t want her around because she was a reminder of death, a reminder of what dreaded possibility they, too, might face? If it could happen to Tilda McQueen O’Connell, it could happen to me. If Tilda could wind up all alone, then so could I.
    There was an antiquated notion of married women not wanting their single girlfriends around for fear they would try to steal the husbands. But Tilda refused to believe that anyone she and Frank had called friends would indulge in such a dated, sexist stereotype. They had all gone to college. All the women had careers. So what was the problem?
    About a year earlier she had read a blog in which the writer, a woman divorced after almost thirty years of marriage, had warned that single women could be “ghetto-ized” if they didn’t “live strong.” At first the choice of words had struck Tilda as overly dramatic but as time went on, she had come to agree wholeheartedly with the writer’s observation. Only in movies were single women—some of them—glamorous and wanted.
    It had been different in the beginning. Soon after Frank’s death, friends had reached out and invited Tilda to dinners and card parties and picnics, but the mood at such gatherings was invariably tense, as if no one wanted to be the first to laugh and thereby declare that life went on even after the death of someone special. So then the invitations to dinner and card parties and picnics waned and in some cases, mostly the cases of married couples, eventually stopped coming. Tilda had told herself that she didn’t really care. And for a while, she really didn’t care. She did nothing to encourage a social life. She stopped making friendly phone calls, stopped replying to e-mails, stopped suggesting lunches or movies or shopping trips to the outlets in Freeport.
    Now, two years and some months after Frank’s death, she found that she had become alienated from the majority of her old friends and acquaintances. Now, two years and some months after Frank’s death, she found that she did care about being alone. She cared very much.
    Invariably, weekends were the loneliest. She was hesitant to invite a couple over for dinner, or to ask them out to a movie—wasn’t Saturday night date night for most couples? And didn’t couples spend lots of time on the weekends hunkered down with their children and running errands and doing chores they had not managed to squeeze in to their hectic work weeks? No one had time for a single woman, divorced or widowed. Or so it sometimes seemed to Tilda, who, as she readily acknowledged, struggled against self-pity but all too often succumbed to its dubious comforts.
    She couldn’t very well beg Jane and Jon to spend their weekends with her. It would be unfair to them, and unreasonable. The kids had homework and jobs and social lives of their own. She felt she should be thankful they still lived at home, though more and more it seemed that they only stopped by for the occasional meal or to sleep. But their moving away from her was inevitable. Time brought change.
    It was just that Tilda had never expected this particular change, that at the