From New York Times bestselling author Jill Barnett comes the rich and poignantly insightful story of a woman’s journey, from first love to last, from marriage and motherhood to loneliness and confusion. Suddenly her safe and steady world has changed. And she cannot go back…so March Cantrell must face the question: How do I go on?
March Cantrell leads a golden life, in the Golden State, raising a family in San Francisco with her husband of thirty years, who when they first met, dreamt of making snowboarding into a sport. Together March and Mike make that dream come true.
Then tragedy hits the golden
Cantrells
. Alone and lost, March tries to come to terms with her loss, but its crippling affect hits all the family. Soon March’s competitive older sons are constantly fighting over the family company and causing rift after rift. Her youngest child is silent…until he flees the nest for college. And her rebellious, seldom-silent daughter falls under the spell of a big-name sports celebrity with a slew of failed marriages, and who is twice her age.
Life as March knew it is gone. Nothing is calm. Nothing is golden. And everyone wants to tell her what she should do and not do. Until a family holiday in Lake Tahoe, where fate brings a stranger into March’s life, someone who understands what it’s like to be a lost soul in a crowd, and who just might be the one to show her the bridge back to happiness.
Table of Contents
Bridge to Happiness
by
Jill Barnett
Bell Bridge Books
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead,) events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Bell Bridge Books
PO BOX 300921
Memphis, TN 38130
ISBN:
978-1-935661-83-2
Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 by Jill Barnett
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
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Cover design: Debra Dixon
Interior design: Hank Smith
Photo credits:
Woman © Magdalena
Ascough
| Dreamstime.com
Bridge (manipulated) ©
Hasan
Can
Balcioglu
| Dreamstime.com
:Mtbh:01:
March is not us, nor are her experiences ours. This story is fiction. But we know her world, because we have traveled down the same kind of unfamiliar, muddied roads, because we had to overcome the past to find a future, because of this and so much more,
Bridge To Happiness
is for Jane, Meryl, Cathy, JJ, Deb,
Betina
, and me.
What is this really like? Never mind the conventions and the decisions we’ve all made together. What is it
really
like?
—Mike Nichols,
Inside the Actor’s Studio
San Francisco is a mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.
—
Rudyard Kipling
The month of March is a time of lions and lambs, and in California, the time of four-leafed mustard blooms some claim are luckier than clover, certainly more resilient. No matter what the weather: freak snow and ice, brush fires, crackling drought or Pineapple-Express-rains that drive homes down crumbling hillsides, despite all that Mother Nature can cast down from the heavens, every year the mustard grows back.
March Randolph Cantrell was named for the time of year she came into the world, and had lived all of her life in a golden state. Native Californians are immanent beings who can recognize instinctively the color and stillness of earthquake weather, and are never divided by that invisible latitude/attitude that separates Northern from Southern; they understand the human geography of one whose first breath of air was in a land of gold rushes, gold hillsides and golden bridges.