Read How I Came to Sparkle Again Online
Authors: Kaya McLaren
How I Came to Sparkle Again
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Contents
To Jen, Randy, Ben, and Jody, for the best winter of my life
Acknowledgments
Thank you, Soul Sister Ranger Andee Hansen, for turning me onto tele skiing at a low point in my life and shouting, “Beautiful!” at me every time I fired off a decent turn. It brought me back to life.
I’d like to acknowledge Jen Reed, my soul sister and ski partner, and my ski brothers: Ben Whitting, Jody Wilson, and Randy Fox. They all took me under their wings, helped me ski better, and in doing so, cultivate some sparkly mojo. My friendships with them are what made me want to write a book about what good friends on snow can do for a person’s spirit. Skiing Wolf Creek with them is the closest I’ve ever been to heaven. You guys gave me the best winter of my life.
Big thanks to John “Remy” Rimelspach at Crystal Mountain, for letting me hang out in his snow cat and listen to all his outrageous and hilarious stories. Let’s remember that this book is a work of fiction and of course Remy would never do anything illegal or out of compliance with company policy. Remy would also like everyone to know that he is NOT a womanizer. I repeat: Remy is NOT a womanizer.
Thanks to my ski patrol sources: John Reed from Wolf Creek, and Elaine Marquez, Lisa Ponchlet, Alicia Sullivan, and Ron Lnenicka from Crystal Mountain. All of these people were incredibly generous with their time and patient with my questions.
Thanks Jan Covey, for being another ski culture and mountain life consultant and for taking me along to the Dirtbag Ball.
Thank you, Bobbi at Between the Covers in Telluride, Colorado, for helping me with the snow reports.
Thank you J. Wes Huesser II, attorney at law in the great state of Texas, for generously sharing your counsel on the legal aspects of the story. If I lived in Texas and had a dirtbag husband I needed to unload, I’d hire Wes to be my divorce attorney any day.
Thank you, Tess Haddon, for your expertise on OB/GYN nursing, for sharing your stories, and your heart. Thank you also, Sasha Hull Ormand, for nurse practitioner info. It needs to be said that nurses are earth angels.
So are EMS fire fighters. Thank you to those of them in my life who told me stories that just broke my heart: John Jensen Jr., Matt Laas, and Kent Huntington. Thanks to Kent’s wife and my second cousin, Kathy Huntington, for more insight as well. Thank you, Mike Hamilton, for giving it a final read.
Thank you to Leanne Webster, for sharing your experiences with growing up LDS and breaking away from it. I need to add that one of my most cherished friends is Mormon and I have never felt judged by her. I was worried that this book would offend her and asked her about it, and she said, no, it wouldn’t offend her because she’s not like the mother in this book. It wasn’t my intention to insult or offend; it was only my intention to illustrate how difficult relationships are when one person makes judgments about the worthiness of another person’s soul.
Thanks to all the men in my life for their insight into the male psyche: my dad, my brother, Remy, and Randy Porch, Ben Witting, Travis Judd, Jordan Krug, Michael Kidder, Scott Smith, and Mike Rolfs. Thanks for tolerating my uncomfortable questions, and trying your best to answer them.
Thanks, of course, to my agents at J.R.A, Meg Ruley and Christina Hogrebe, for their inspiration, counsel, laughter, and encouragement, and for making my dreams come true. Whenever I picture them, I always imagine them in really pretty fairy godmother costumes. They’re sparkly like that.
Big thanks to Kendra Harpster and Elizabeth Day, for the time and talent they put into earlier drafts of this story. I love you both and deeply appreciate all you’ve done for me in my career.
Finally, thank you, thank you, thank you Jen Enderlin, for loving this book so much, for your passion and your clarity. You are a brilliant editor and I feel incredibly lucky to work with you.
prologue
Austin, Texas
It was fair to say Jill Anthony’s first day back at work had been a disaster—so much so, in fact, that her supervisor had sent her home early. She just wasn’t ready to be back. Enough time had not passed.
She was still crying when, just four blocks from her house, her car died.
Perfect,
she thought.
Just perfect.
She shook her head in disbelief and then got out of the car. Usually she changed into street clothes before leaving work, but because she had left quickly today, she now found herself walking down the street in stork scrubs that looked a lot like pajamas. The combination of the scrubs and the crying left her feeling like quite a spectacle, exposed and vulnerable as she made her way home on foot through her affluent neighborhood.
She approached her big, beautiful Bavarian-style brick-and-timber house with relief, despite the fact that it recently had held so much grief and sadness. It was still her sanctuary.
She crossed the street and paused where the path to her house met the sidewalk. There, she opened her mailbox and pulled out a handful of envelopes. At the top of the stack was an envelope with handwriting on it—an actual personal letter! It was from her old best friend, Lisa, and postmarked Sparkle, Colorado.
Sparkle—it was home to her mother’s brother, Howard, who had taken her in during a difficult time in her teen years. How long had it been since she’d been back for a visit? She tried to figure it out, but could figure out only that it had been well over a decade.
As Jill walked from the mailbox up the path toward the door, she counted down the eighteen steps she knew it took to get there. The embarrassing weepy walk in scrubs would be over in five steps, four steps, three, two, and one. She put her key in the lock, eager to get inside, turned it, and opened the door. She stepped in, shut the door behind her, and exhaled. It was over. She was home safe.
Then she heard them. Noises. It sounded as though two people had broken into her home and were having sex. Jill reached in her purse for her phone to call the police, but then she heard David’s distinctive moans.
It couldn’t be,
she thought. It couldn’t be David—her David, who had held her hand in the hospital during her complicated miscarriage just six weeks before. It couldn’t be her David, who had said wedding vows to her and bought this house for the family they would have. It couldn’t be.
A terrible doubt propelled her. She had to see. She had to see it for herself.
Creeping up the stairs with her phone, she rested her hand on her abdomen, still tender and loose even after six weeks. At the top of the stairs, she walked slowly and silently in her soft nurse’s shoes past the closed door of the baby’s room. They had found it easier to keep the door closed until they were ready to decide whether to adopt or change it back into a guest bedroom.
She walked a little farther, stopping right outside the bedroom door, then peeked around the corner of the open door and saw long dark hair falling down the back of a voluptuous woman who was straddling her husband in their bed. Jill pulled back in horror. It was true. How could it be true? Even as that new level of shock began to wash over her, disbelief still reigned. She noticed the cell phone still in her hand and knew that she would need a picture of this to help her through future moments of disbelief and denial. She peeked around the corner again. At least one of her husband’s hands groped the woman’s breasts as she bounced wildly on him.
“Fuck, yeah. Fuck, yeah!” he cried out.
Jill couldn’t see his eyes, but she saw the very top of his head, his curly brown hair cut short and the places at his temples where his hairline had begun to recede dramatically.
She reached out with her phone and pressed a button, then pulled back to her place around the corner and looked at the picture she just took. It was undeniably real.
Slowly she began to absorb the parameters of her new reality. It stung her eyes and pierced her heart to its core. She tried to decide what to do, whether to confront him in the act, but she couldn’t think over the loud voice in her head repeating over and over:
Run
.
As she clambered back down the stairs and opened the door, she made no effort to be quiet.
She walked the four blocks back to the Lexus, called a wrecker, and waited for it under a tree in a nearby yard.
When the wrecker finally arrived, the driver misinterpreted the horrified expression on her blotchy face and said, “It’s going to be okay, ma’am. It’s probably just your alternator. We can fix that. We can fix anything. So the real question remains whether every problem is worth fixing. The answer to that is no.” Jill thought he bore a striking resemblance to Willie Nelson and contemplated how what he said applied to her marriage. Just as she was coming close to reaching a conclusion, the driver said, “The Lexus is a nice car. It’s still worth a lot. When a car has that much value, it’s always worth fixing.”
She contemplated that too as he pulled into the shop. But maybe her marriage wasn’t a Lexus. Maybe it was a Pinto—one of those cars famous for blowing up when rear-ended. As she waited for the mechanics to fix her car, she walked out the back door to the wrecking yard and through the aisles of totaled cars and pickups, vehicles that other people had decided weren’t worth fixing. She felt just like them. She felt like that Buick with the driver’s-side door so crushed that the driver was undoubtedly hurt, but from the look of the other side, the passenger likely skated through unscathed. She felt like the Saturn with the shattered windshield through which no one could see what lay ahead. It looked as if it had been sandwiched in a multicar pileup. Jill knew exactly how it felt to crash into one thing and then get smashed from behind. She studied the Saturn and wondered whether it would have been salvageable if it had only been rear-ended instead of sandwiched, and she wondered if the same was true about her marriage.
The late afternoon air turned a little cold around the edges, so Jill walked back to the waiting area. She sat in a vinyl chair, stared straight ahead, and waited. She thought ridiculous thoughts, like wondering whether all the food she bought for Thanksgiving would go to waste or whether David would try to make something out of it, and if so, whether he knew when to put the turkey in the refrigerator to defrost. She pictured herself running away from David with her frozen turkey, pecans, and cranberries.