I share with her all about my conundrum with the prologue, and to my relief, she agrees wholeheartedly with my assessment.
“I truly wish that the first impression your readers have of Benis one of life and joy,” she says, before suggesting a new direction. “Maybe you could tell the story of how you met?”
“That’s actually covered in the last chapter of the book, and it works so beautifully in that spot. I don’t think I can move it,” I say.
“What about the last conversation you had with him?”
“I thought about that,” I tell her. “The one that sticks out in my mind is our drive home from Canopy when y’all had the kids for the weekend. I do love the idea of the prologue being a conversation between Ben and me.”
“Those are my two suggestions—let life and joy be your guide as you try to figure this out,” she adds.
Cecily never lets silence enter a conversation—in person or over the phone. She always has questions or stories. So, when the silence hits after we talk about the prologue, I’m surprised. She stares intently at me, peering over the tops of her cat-eye spectacles.
“What’s his name?” she asks, smiling. My shock registers on the video call, and she adds, “Gracie, I always hoped—no, knew—this call would come.”
Some people are outgoing and extroverted in a selfish way. They can fill a room but not remember much about the people in it. Cecily is the opposite. She is boisterous and fun but also observant. She always reads your body language and looks you in the eye. Ben got this quality from her and it was something I loved deeply about him. You leave every conversation feeling heard and appreciated. Josh is the same, come to think of it. I shouldn’t be surprised that she figured this out.
“His name is Josh,” I say with a shaky voice. “And it’s all a lot to process.”
“Oh, sweetie, start from the beginning. Don’t leave out the details,” she says with caring eyes and a smile.
For the next thirty minutes, I do exactly that, telling her the story from the very beginning. How Ben and I came to know James, how James introduced me to Josh, the way the summer has unfolded, my creative bursts of genius, the house somehow coming together, the opening of my heart, and my ridiculous attempts to close it right back up again. I paint her a picture of who Josh is so that she can imagine him in her mind’s eye.
“He sounds wonderful,” she says. “So, what’s the real problem here, my girl?”
“It’s hard,” I explain. I’m crying. “To believe that I am worthy of a second great love. Why me, Cecily? And why so soon after losing Ben? I’m broken and the kids are pretty broken and why is it Josh’s job to be here while we fix it all? He deserves something simpler.”
I’m a mess again, and I can tell that Cecily is fighting her own emotions. It’s also quiet again, making me uncomfortable.
“It’s my turn to talk now, sweetheart,” she says, breaking the silence and launching into a story that I’ve never heard before about her first marriage to the father of Ben’s oldest brother, Sam. “You’ve known for a very long time that I was married before Charlie, but the story behind the story isn’t one that I’ve told many people. I met Sam’s dad when I was eighteen. I was head over heels in love with that man from the day we met. When he asked me to marry him, I was convinced this was the person I’d be sitting on a porch swing with when I was eighty-five. Of course, it didn’t end up that way. I was six months pregnant when he left me for some girl he met on a work trip. I listened to your interview the otherday, Gracie—that life you described being snatched away? That was my story, too. Gone in an instant. I had exactly eighteen months of thinking life couldn’t get any better.
“Charlie and I had been neighbors since we were little kids. He came home for the holidays that year—his sophomore year at East Carolina—and saw the state of me. Puffy eyes, swollen belly, unceremoniously served divorce papers a few days before Christmas. I thought Charlie was taking pity, judging by the way he stared at me. He had turned into this strikingly handsome guy, and I was a mess.
“It was warm that winter, and I sat out front on my parents’ porch swing for a long time, lost in my thoughts. Charlie came over at some point in the midafternoon, and we spent hours talking. It was the happiest I’d been in a long while. His mom gave him a supper warning and we got ready to part ways, but somehow, he worked up the courage to tell me exactly how he felt about me. He’d loved me since we were twelve years old. He had spent most of high school trying to work up the courage to ask me out but could never quite do it. He didn’t plan to go to college but went away so he wouldn’t have to see me married to someone else. I had been clueless about all of this.
“Then he told me something I didn’t think was possible: that he still loved me, deeply, and if I could open my heart to him, he would love me and care for me—and for the baby. I refused to believe it, and that’s the whole point of this story, Gracie: I didn’t feel worthy of Charlie’s love. I didn’t feel worthy of God blessing me with another love story—a real love. I didn’t feel worthy, period. Charlie had to convince me that I was worthy, and Istillalmost blew it a few times over the years.
“I moved to Greenville to be with Charlie when Sam was only a few months old, and the rest is history, as they say. Forty-seven years and counting. When idiots in town would tell him he was a second choice, he would just brush them off and say, ‘Maybe so, but I’m also the final choice.’ Charlie has always seen me as worthy of his love.
“Gracie, our Ben was kind and generous and so full of love for you and the kids that sometimes I thought he might burst from it all,” Cecily says, tears now rolling down her cheeks. “Our Ben would want nothing more than for you to find love again. Our Ben knows you are worthy of this, Gracie, just like I do and like Charlie knew I was.”
Our Ben. The first time we visited Ben’s parents after getting engaged, Cecily quietly pulled me out onto the patio. She handed me a glass of wine and asked if she could spend a few minutes sharing her philosophy on what makes mother- and daughter-in-law relationships work. By this point, Cecily and I had spent plenty of time together and loved one another. What more could there be to know?
She started off by telling me that she had given this same talk to her three other children by marriage—two other daughters-in-law and one son-in-law. All three of them, like me, adored her.
“The fact of the matter is thatIhave a Ben andyouhave a Ben,” she began in a direct tone. “My Ben is the version that a mother sees. My Ben is in my arms as an infant, he’s snuggling in the bed as a toddler who is afraid of the dark, he’s an outgoing preteen who turns into a sometimes-moody teenager. He’s a boisterous young man heading off to college. He is thoughtful but sometimes self-centered. He is caring but sometimes forgetful. He’s the baby of thefamily and all of the things that come with that. He is my Ben. The thing is, Gracie, you have your own version of Ben. I could make guesses as to what that man is like, but it would be clouded by my own judgment. We see our partners in a very different way than their families do—the Ben you’ve grown with over the last four years isn’t the one I know. For the next phase of his life, you will spend more time with him than any other person. We will both watch him grow, hopefully, into a successful professional, a caring husband, and a loving dad. But we will see all of this through our own lenses. Those lenses are different. There is no way around it.”
Cecily and Ben shared such a fun-loving, lighthearted approach to life. I remember being caught off guard by how serious the conversation was.
“Gracie, what makes a relationship like ours successful is the ability to see the Venn diagram,” she continued. “MyBen on one side andyourBen on the other. In the middle, the intersection, isourBen. The overlap is where all of the things that we both know and love about Ben exist. It is a shared frame of reference.”
Over the years that followed, Cecily and I would share countless conversations about Ben where we would referencemyandour. It was a graceful and ingenious shorthand that allowed us to communicate clearly and without prejudice.
“Our Ben really was incredible, wasn’t he?” I say, wiping away tears and glancing at the time. “Gosh, it’s four already. Cecily, I don’t want to hang up, but there are a few things I need to do to be ready to have the kids back tomorrow.”
“Gracie, one more thing before we go,” she starts, her voice cracking. “I can’t wait to meet him: my future son-in-law.”
“Will he get the Venn diagram speech?” I ask through my tears.
