The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(10)

Because the walls are coming down.

Until now she’s felt so safe with these Internet friendships. When you’re shy and accustomed to maintaining your privacy, there’s a certain comfort to keeping people at arm’s length—in real life, anyway.

Now that her mother is gone and her old schoolmates and neighbors have moved away or moved on, caught up in lives of their own, there are no real life friends. There are no longer even colleagues: she was laid off from her job as a guard at the federal prison in Terre Haute a few years ago, thanks to budget cuts.

Kay spends most of her time alone, unless you count people she’s never even met in person.

Her online friends are her family. The only people in the world she cares about; the only ones who care about her.

A final message pops onto her screen from Bama: I wish we all lived in the same town so that we could help each other through this.

Me too, Kay replies automatically, though she doesn’t really wish that . . . does she?

The bloggers have had an ongoing discussion about getting together in person sometime. Recently, someone suggested organizing a meeting to coincide with breast cancer awareness month in October, or joining forces for one of the Making Strides walks around the country, or for a march in Washington, D.C.

Kay isn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that it’s never managed to get beyond the wishful thinking stage.

In real life relationships, there’s always pressure.

If her online friends met her in person, they might expect her to be something she isn’t. Or they might turn out to be something she doesn’t want them to be.

Then I’d lose everything.

That can’t happen. It’s too special—sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps her going. She loves these people and she needs them, now more than ever . . .

She pushes back her chair, stands, and gets halfway across the room before pausing to straighten a framed photo that doesn’t really need straightening.

It’s an old black and white portrait showing her parents on their wedding day, circa 1962. They were together two decades before Kay was born, then separated before her first birthday.

Her mother never forgave her for that; or for being born—which was, after all, the reason he left.

Mother never came right out and said her conception had been an accident, or that they hadn’t wanted children, or that it was Kay’s fault the love of her life had walked out, leaving her a struggling single mother.

She didn’t have to say it.

It was obvious from the way her mother looked at her, the way she treated her, the way she cried over old photos of him . . .

Especially this one.

In it, her parents are standing on the steps of a church that used to sit a few miles from this house where Kay has lived all her life, in the western suburbs of Indianapolis. She remembers when the church was torn down, about ten years ago, maybe fifteen, to make way for a now-defunct shopping plaza. Yes, at least fifteen years ago, because Mother was still alive, she had recently been diagnosed with cancer, the Indianapolis News was still the evening paper, and business was still booming in this neighborhood.

Mother tore out the short article with its side-by-side black and white photos—before and after, from brick church to pile of rubble—and showed it to Kay.

“This is where Daddy and I were married,” she said, as if Kay didn’t know; as if that man had actually been a “daddy” to her.

As old age and illness got the best of her, Mother was increasingly delusional.

“I always thought I’d have my funeral there,” she said wistfully. “Now where will it be?”

“Please don’t talk about that, Mother.”

“I have to talk about it. It’s not that far off, you know.”

Yes. Kay knew.

She stares at the picture of her parents on their wedding day over fifty years ago, looking into each other’s eyes with blatant adoration. Her mother, in dark lipstick and a puffy veil, and her father, in a dark suit with a skinny tie, are obviously madly in love.

The photo sat upstairs, framed on her mother’s bedside table, until the day she died.

All her life, Kay had hated looking at it. Yet when the time came, she couldn’t bear to throw it away.

Maybe it was better to hang onto it, she decided, as a reminder never to get too close to any man. You’d only end up alone and brokenhearted.

“The old saying is wrong. It’s not better to have loved and lost,” her mother used to rasp in her cigarette voice. “Believe me. If you don’t love, you can’t lose.”

Kay took those words to heart. In her formative years, she had casual friendships, even a date here and there . . . but managed to avoid the risks that come with real relationships. Now, when she wants companionship, she finds it online, and when she needs a creative outlet, she posts entries on her blog.

That’s how she met Meredith and BamaBelle and the others—how many years has it been now?

She used to be able to keep track of things like that. But a lot of details about the past have become fuzzy lately.

Too bad she can’t choose which memories to keep and which to let go. There are a few that persist in haunting her waking hours and dreams, and she’d give anything to banish them forever.

You left me! Why did you leave me?

I didn’t leave you, Mother! I’ve been right here by your bed!