Then Linda asked:
“Children?”
“Two daughters. Wonderful women. Very busy.”
“My son is good too.”
She paused.
“Also very busy.”
Gerald lifted his glass.
“And yet here we are.”
Linda raised hers.
“And here we are.”
The following days carried them through Nuremberg, Munich, Salzburg, Innsbruck, and eventually Switzerland.
Each city gave Linda something she hadn’t known she was missing.
In Salzburg, she and Patricia spent twenty minutes debating whether its Christmas market was better than Rothenburg’s.
It was the first argument Linda had enjoyed in years.
Then came Innsbruck.
And the mountains.
Linda had not stood before mountains since a Colorado road trip with Paul in 1998.
She had forgotten what they did to perspective.
The enormous peaks didn’t make her problems disappear.
They simply moved them farther away.
Hannah’s voice telling her to stay home moved backward.
The empty Christmas house moved backward.
Eight years of reshaping herself around everyone else’s expectations moved backward.
The mountains remained.
Huge.
Silent.
Indifferent.
Patricia came and stood beside her.
She said nothing.
Linda realized she hadn’t had a friend who knew when silence was enough in a very long time.
By the seventh day, in Lucerne, Linda did something she almost never did.
She posted photographs online.
She had created a social media account two years earlier because Mark suggested it might help her stay connected.
Mostly she used it to look at other people’s grandchildren.
But this time she posted pictures of herself.
Christmas markets.
Meals she couldn’t pronounce.
The ornaments she had collected.
A wooden bear from Salzburg.
A small cowbell from Innsbruck.
A paper star from Lucerne.
