I Forgot... by Liz Flaherty

The two words of the title are also the two words I say more than any others these days. I also say "Excuse me?" a lot because my always excellent hearing isn't so excellent anymore. Two and a half days after returning from Nan's and my super-retreat in South Haven, Michigan, I'm still tired. 

While there are things about aging we can do something about, there are even more that we can't. That is a very hard pill to swallow. And believe me, we get really good at swallowing pills.

However, I forgot to post on October 2, which is my day. So I'm doing it on the 7th instead. 

In the past month or so, I re-released The Girls of Tonsil Lake. I was trying to think of a good way of writing about it here, then remembered I'd posted about it when it first came out, traditionally published, a long time ago. 

I'm going to share that post here, but here are the new buy links for it. If you didn't read it before--or even if you did--I hope you'll take another look and let me know what you think. 

Amazon: https://a.co/d/dZbiruT

Books2Read: https://books2read.com/u/bxGQQk

Four women whose differences only deepen the friendship forged in a needy childhood...

They were four little girls living in ramshackle trailers beside a lake in rural Indiana. They shared everything from dreams to measles to boyfriends to more dreams. As they grew up, everything in their lives changed--except their friendship. Through weddings and divorces, births and deaths, one terrible secret has kept them close despite all the anger, betrayal, and pain.
Now, forty years later, facing illness, divorce, career challenges, and even addiction, the women come together once again for a bittersweet month on an island in Maine. Staring down their fifties, they must consider the choices life is offering them now and face the pain of what happened long ago.
Secrets are revealed and truths uncovered, but will their time together cement their lifelong friendship--or drive them apart forever?

Sound good? I hope so. Just to keep you interested, here's a little excerpt, too. This is from Vin, one of the Girls.

I wanted Andie to come to New York, but she didn’t feel up to it. I felt a little shudder go through me when she said that. Andie’s always been so strong, and she’s cancer-free, so I found it startling and frightening when she admitted to feeling less than wonderful. But, as Let There Be Hope shows, cancer changes one in sometimes indefinable ways. Maybe this is one of those changes.
Mark and I visited some islands off the Maine coast once, in our early days. I was so enthralled that he bought me a house on one of them, a little strip of green called, appropriately enough, Hope Island. It reminds me of Bennett’s Island, the fictitious utopia of Elisabeth Ogilvie’s books, except that Hope has all the mod cons.
I love to go there. It’s a place I can be myself with little regard to what anyone else thinks. I sit in my bathrobe on the wraparound porch of the Victorian horror that is my house and drink coffee with Lucas Bishop, our neighbor. I read Jean’s books without worrying that someone will see the covers.
I’ve never taken anyone else—it was Mark’s and my private getaway—but I wouldn’t mind if it was Andie who was there. Or Jean and even Suzanne. Andie and I could work on her book. Jean could cook and keep house since she’s so crazy about doing that, and maybe even spin out one of her romances placed on an island. And Suzanne could...do our hair or something.
We would all be together as we are that single night every year when we drive to the lake and pretend we’re facing down our ghosts. I am a little afraid that the day will come that we’ll have to face them down for real.

I wonder if they’d come.

Want to meet Suzanne, too? Here she is:

Let’s get this straight right off the bat, all right? I’m blonde. Not naturally, but blonde nonetheless. I started frosting my hair in freshman year, when everyone else seemed to fit in at the high school and I didn’t, and it worked so well I’ve never looked back. This does not, regardless of what Andie, Jean, and Vin think, make me stupid. Nor does it make me a bimbo, shallow, or a sex maniac. Just between you and me, I will admit that sometimes I am every one of those things, but it doesn’t have one thing to do with me being blonde.
I went to college to be a kindergarten teacher, attending Indiana State University at Terre Haute. For those of you born outside Indiana, this is pronounced Terra Hote, not Terra Hut or Terra Hoot.
Only a few semesters away from graduation, I got pregnant. The baby’s father, who suddenly discovered he had a wife and kids, paid for the abortion. Andie and Jean drove over from Bloomington, where they were in school, to take me to the clinic. Jean tried to talk me out of the abortion, Andie yelled at both of us all the way across town, and I cried. But I went through with it.
It’s something I try not to think about. I’m not always successful at that in the middle of dark and lonely nights, but uninterrupted nights of sleep are some of those things that reside in the rose gardens no one ever promised me.
There was no concentrating on classes after that, so I sold my books for a pittance, packed up, and left Terre Haute. I got off the bus a couple hours later in Lewis Point, a nice town about an hour south of Indianapolis, and that was where I stayed. I got a job over Christmas in a classy department store, and the most exclusive makeup supplier they had offered me a job as a sales rep.

It’s been the saving of me, I guess, outlasting two marriages and sending both my kids to college. I love what I do, love making women look and feel better about themselves. I wish it was a job that earned respect from others, but I respect it—so maybe that’s enough.

I don't have a favorite among them, but I hope you do. I hope you want to meet all four of them and settle into the recliner to read their story.