How I Came to Sparkle Again Read Online Free PDF Page B

said.
    “Everything’s going to be okay,” Lisa assured her again, and then walked out the door.
    *   *   *
     
    When Jill woke from her nap, she found her uncle Howard sitting in the rocking chair on Lisa’s porch. She opened the door and he stood. “I heard you were back,” he said.
    Jill looked up at him, at his gentle face, at the red Norwegian sweater he had been wearing for the last twenty years, and at the hat with the pom-pom on top that he’d picked up in Whistler sometime in the mid 1980s. His ever-present backpack sat at his feet. Aside from looking a little older, he hadn’t changed at all, and something about looking at him made Jill feel she’d made it to safety. She burst into tears.
    “Hey,” he said as he put his arms around her. “Hey, now. It’s going to be okay. You’re here now.”
    Jill tried to tell him that she had lost the baby and that her husband was cheating on her, but all the sounds that came out of her were indecipherable.
    “I know,” Uncle Howard said. “Lisa told me the story. I’m sorry.” He hugged her a little longer, until her sobs quieted, and then said, “Let’s go inside. I have something to make you strong.”
    They walked into Lisa’s house and sat at the counter. Uncle Howard opened his backpack and took out a package of wild Alaskan smoked salmon. “To give you strength, determination, the ability to make it past any obstacle, and to affirm your homing device,” he said.
    Uncle Howard believed that people ingested the energy from food as well as the nutrients. He had been a world-class mountain climber in the 1970s and had come across many cultures in his travels. Their belief systems had all blended into Uncle Howard’s unique set of truths.
    Next, he pulled out some Jarlsberg cheese. “From Norway,” he explained. “Norwegians are unstoppable. I suspect this cheese is their secret to health and longevity.” Finally, he pulled out a whole-grain baguette. “Made here, in Sparkle, by Mari Wallace, yoga teacher extraordinaire. May it fill you with her sense of peace and her playful spirit.” He took a little cutting board out of his backpack as well as a pocketknife and began to slice the cheese.
    They tore off pieces of bread and fish and assembled them with the cheese slices. As Jill ate hers, she thought of all of Uncle Howard’s good wishes. “Thank you,” she said.
    “Are you drinking enough water?” Uncle Howard asked.
    Jill shook her head.
    “That’s the best way to get the energy and the strength of Sparkle back into you.” He stood, found a glass, and poured some tap water for Jill. “Plus, you can’t think clearly if you’re dehydrated.”
    Jill smiled and drank the water.
    “More?” he asked.
    “No, thanks.” Guilt washed over her. “I’m sorry I didn’t come to visit all these years. It just was so hard to step out of daily life … my work, David’s work, building a life there in Austin. I never wanted to go to my parents’ house for Christmas, so on those rare years I didn’t have to work that day, we always went back east to visit his. I feel bad that I didn’t assert with him just how much you meant to me, how you were the dad I wished I had. But you know, I didn’t really want to bring him here. Isn’t that funny? I just knew he didn’t belong here. And it felt disloyal to go anywhere without him. I realize now that was stupid.”
    “You know, Jill, the beauty of the uncle-niece relationship is overlooked in our cultural paradigm.” With Uncle Howard, she often had to ignore his words and just look at his expression to understand what he was trying to say. He was trying to say he forgave her. “And, you know, it’s not like I ever made it to Austin. I don’t know where all those years went.”
    “You sent me a nice postcard from time to time, though. I always meant to answer, but it seemed I was always in a rush to work or to the store or to home. I feel bad about that.” She had kept all of his