The Way Back to Happiness by Elizabeth Bass

come home. The entire return trip, all the things she could have said—should have said—tumbled through her mind. Too late. It was so frustrating. She couldn’t believe she’d sat there and listened to her mother talk about her as if she lacked sympathy and understanding. Why, she was so understanding it was practically a handicap. She was helping kids all the time at school, the ones who came to her with problems during her conference time. Of course, she wasn’t always able to do much for these kids. Time remained the surest remedy for most afflictions of adolescence. But she was there for them. She listened, she understood.
    And when she’d been young, troubled, and brokenhearted, who had she been able to turn to? Not her mother, that was for darn sure. Gladys had always been able to shed a tear or two over the gentle wisdom of Marcus Welby, but when it came to the drama in her own house, she’d remained aloof. Even when Bev’s life had been ruined—permanently, irretrievably shattered to bits—Gladys had said she had to remain impartial. Impartial meant taking Diana’s side. As usual.
    Old resentments filled her chest until she felt overinflated, breathless. She exhaled and forced herself to turn her thoughts in a different direction. Forward, not backward.
    There was so much she had to do. For one thing, she’d emptied out her craft room in anticipation of Alabama’s moving in, and now its contents sprawled through the rest of the house—wood and tools heaped in corners, bolts of cloth and yarn spilling across the dining room table. The sewing machine stood in a hallway, forcing her to walk sideways to squeeze past it every time she made a trip to the bathroom.
    She’d intended to organize the garage to absorb the overflow, and had even gone so far as to contact Keith Mitchell about building shelves, but now Alabama wasn’t coming. The spare room could be the craft room again. Maybe that’s where Keith should build the shelves. But what should she do with the furniture in Alabama’s bedroom? The dresser might come in handy for storage, but the painted iron daybed she bought at a flea market would never be used enough to justify the space it took up.
    The truth was, she hadn’t only been excited about the room, but also about the prospect of having someone else in the house. She hadn’t had a roommate since college—not that Alabama would have been a roommate, exactly, but she would have been company. Not very pleasant company all the time, if the past few weeks were any indication, but even a hostile Alabama would have been someone to share life with. Lately the years were spinning by faster and faster, and sometimes she felt so alone. Friends from high school had met their soul mates, married, had kids, pulled away from her. They had all moved away or were still in Dallas, busy with their lives, and she was busy, too, her own life consumed by school, hobbies, after-school Future Homemakers of America meetings and parent-teacher nights, and driving once a week to see her mother and run the same errands again and again.
    Each time she stole out to visit old friends, it seemed they had less in common. These women griped almost boastfully about their busy days tending to children, and the trouble their sprawling suburban homes caused them, and the tribulations of school as seen from the other side. And vacations! Everyone had always just come back from or was about to jet off to somewhere exotic. When they asked about Bev’s life at all, the questions highlighted its deficits. When are you going to get married? Do you see kids on the horizon? They were waiting for her life to begin so she’d have something to talk about that interested them. She was waiting for that, too.
    Of course, she had Derek.
    Then again, she didn’t have Derek. He was independent, and both of them had been living alone for so long. Half the time she felt she’d die if he didn’t pop the question, but occasionally after he