Harry's Girls

By Sandy Grissom

Two sisters are very different. One stayed in a small town and married her high school sweetheart. The other went away to college and took a job in the city. When their father dies, the city girl comes home to discover she will need to take over construction on a house her father started. Then to her surprise her father has left it and his house to her and a man who spent time in prison but is reformed. It seems from the grave he hopes the two will fall in love as they have to work together to finish the house he began to build. Her sister is amused but she doesn't know her father had a plan for her life, too. She lost her husband a year before but Harry knew another man had loved her for years. He sets her up so that she has to spend time with him. Will the sisters accept what their deceased dad wants for them or go thier own way?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sandy Grissom
• Release date: May 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224219674

Sandy Grissom

Sandy Grissom has loved books all her life. That love began by listening to her older sister read when she was still too young to discover the magic for herself. She's read everything from history to the phone book but her favorite authors are James Michener, Agatha Christie and the mystic William Blake. Over the years, romantic novels became a favorite. The top of that list is Pride and Prejudice. When she retired she had too much time on her hands and spent too much money and trips to the library to get books in order to satisfy her restless soul. It was then she began to write herself. As an adult she held a variety of jobs, all of them grist for her imaginative mind. The occupations in Choppy Waters will hopefully inspire someone to fight for their own dreams, to never give up on themselves or on love. A widow, Sandy recently moved to southern Indiana where she lives near the younger of her two beloved sisters.

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Table of Contents

Harry's Girls

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Harry’s Girls

by

Sandy Grissom

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Chapter One

Joanna Devine decided that she hated funerals. Moreover, why should anyone be expected to have to deal with so many in such rapid succession? At least, it felt that way today. She had to admit that it had been a long time since she and her sister, Alana, lost their mother, almost twelve years. Afterward, their father had to take on both parental roles. He did a great job but now he was gone, too. It didn’t feel fair.

She thought it too soon because Lee, Alana’s husband, was killed only nine months earlier. It happened in a horrible freeway pileup as he was on his way home from a business trip. Joanna wasn’t sure if Alana had come to terms with the loss yet. She couldn’t imagine the depths of despair this additional blow of losing their father must be causing her sister. She wanted to be there if Alana needed her. Yet at this moment, Jo could only deal with how her dad’s death was affecting her right now.

Alana did seem to be doing well. Perhaps better than Jo. For she was feeling guilty that she should have been home. Alana lived near their father. She was with him and might have accepted he was dying more than Jo because of that. Jo was living in the city where it was easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of life. It was simple to think her dad couldn’t be as bad as he actually was.

It was hard now, she supposed, because she couldn’t think of him ever leaving this earth. She simply couldn't imagine a world without him in it. So he couldn’t be as sick as it seemed. Inn that way, she denied that she might lose her dad. She kept busy so that it was easy to set the idea in the back of her mind that he was as bad as Alana said he was. She supposed she simply didn’t want to believe her father was dying.

She supposed Alana was doing a bit better because she was too near him to ignore how bad he was. In addition, she had a lot of friends to draw support from. Living in the city as she’d been doing, Jo had not kept in close contact with any of her classmates the way Alana did. For she never left the small town they grew up in. She was quite content living there. She kept her friendships going, nurtured them in fact. Jo knew that Alana was fortunate to have her girlfriends’ support.

She lost the support Lee would have been less than a year earlier. Their dad was still alive and Jo expected he helped her sister cope with the loss of her husband. He would have understood what she was going through. Having lost his spouse, the girls’ mother, he could relate to her pain. Though it had been a long time that their mother had gone home to God.

Sadly Joanna could not relate to Alana when she lost Lee. She had never had a husband or even a longtime boyfriend. She could feel the terrible loss mostly in one way. Jo could see how her sister’s life had been planned out and then that plan was obliterated. All her hopes and dreams for the future were gone in an instant leaving nothing behind but a sense of emptiness. Jo had their days’ shoulder to cry on when the days overwhelmed her. And she had the support of her friends. It was enough to help her cope with a new and different life.

She was beginning to make peace with a life without her husband. Not that it was what she wanted but life didn’t always turn out what the way we want it to. Alana’s friends, especially Cindy, kept close when the tragedy happened and made sure she had a shoulder to lean on. When she lost Lee, Jo came home. She babysat with Alana’s two boys several times during that visit. That was when Cindy convinced Alana to go to dinner or a show. Sometimes several of her friends were going which caused Alana not to beg off. Her friends didn’t allow her to stand by and wallow in self-pity or grief then.

She was working to let go of a dream in order to make a happy life for herself and her boys. Then Harry’s girls lost him and Alana had another person to mourn. Alana had her friends so they would be there for her this time, as well. At least that’s what Jo tried to tell herself. But instead she felt guilty that she should have been home to help her.

If that wasn’t enough for Alana to deal with, now she and Jo had lost their father. Jo wondered if Alana would feel the loss of the men in her life in an impactful way. One that might haunt her in times to come. Yet even as she thought that, she knew Alana had a philosophy about living life to the fullest. With that philosophy and her friends to stand by her, that she would be all right.

Jo’s guilt eased a bit. She was then able to turn her thoughts to how the loss of her dad affected her. Jo wasn’t so sure she would cope or even accept his death as graciously as her sister seemed to be doing.

She thought of Alana again. It was easy for her sister to keep close to her friends. It was a small town and she would run into them often. Alana loved the place she grew up in. She had no desire to live anywhere but Marysville. She was happy to stay in their home town after high school while Jo had left for college the year before. She didn’t return except for visits afterward. She was sorry about that now.

She was grieving her father’s loss badly. It made it easier to think how the loss was affecting her sister than herself. So she reminisced on about her sister. Alana married Lee after high school while Joanna was in her first year of college. Jo kept busy with class work and then later on a job. She didn’t think too much about Alana’s life with Lee. She supposed she had her whole life to get to know her sister’s husband.

She realized after he was gone that wasn’t the case. She couldn’t imagine Alana’s grief at knowing that was true for her, as well. It was then that Jo realized she did the same thing when it came to schoolmates. She expected people would be there if she needed them. She forgot that to have friends, one had to be a friend. She hadn’t tried to keep in touch. So she had no close friends with most of the kids in her high school class.

It was six years she’d been gone from Marysville. Many of her classmates had moved away. Either after graduation or since then. They moved to cities where jobs were easier to find. Others went off to college like Jo and never returned. She’d been wrong not to try to keep in touch with her classmates. Yet it felt too late to mend that bridge. She had no idea where most of them were.

Jo had made a select few friends in the city. In truth, they were more acquaintances than friends. It was difficult to make friends in a large city. At least it was for Jo. Now she was back home with her classmates nearly all gone. Odd turnabout, she thought. I have no one’s shoulder to cry on but Alana’s. Yet she has her own grief and I can’t add to hers with mine.

So, she thought again, Alana will handle this loss better than I will. I’m not sure how to accept Dad’s loss and go on. I’ve always been more of a loner. She had to admit that. She was introspective, bookish and standoffish until she got to know someone well. The trouble was that a lot of people wouldn’t allow themselves enough time to get to know her. They expect immediate bonding. You like someone or you don’t. It is that simple for many people.

Alana does that. She accepts people until they do something that alerts her that they have a character flaw. If it is a serious flaw, Alana drops them from her circle of friends. If a minor one, she simply overlooks it. She often says she is not here to try to correct anyone’s behavior but her own. And guide her children to right behavior as well. She believed in an old saying. Now how did it go? Something about if you hurt me, shame on you but if you do it again, shame on me.

That was Alana. She sorted through people, dropped untrustworthy ones and kept the rest. No wonder she had such a wide pool of awesome friends. They knew Alana trusted them. But Jo wasn’t like that. She was never sure why it was but she just wasn’t. People had to build trust with her. She couldn’t accept people at face value. It took time for her to get to know them. They had to prove themselves to her.

That philosophy wasn’t something new and that she’d only recently accepted. It wasn’t something she learned in the city. That might be explained. So many city people had an agenda. They used people more than loved them. No, it wasn’t the city life that caused her to be standoffish. She had always been that way. As far back as she could recall, she never accepted anyone easily or quickly.

She wondered if it stemmed back to something that happened in her childhood. Yet if it was some traumatic something, she didn’t know what the event was that caused her to be wary. If it was some specific event, then why wasn’t Alana affected by it? It would have to have been something personal to her alone. Yet she sighed to suppose that she and her sister were simply different in their way of dealing with people.

Yet being thoughtful as she was at the moment, she wondered if the loss of her mother when she was a teenager affected her more than she realized at the time. Both sets of her grandparents were gone, too. It seemed to her now that everyone she cared about, all but Alana and her boys, were gone. Perhaps each of those losses built on one another and affected her ability to make close attachments. It hurt so much to lose those you loved. No matter that she’d see them one day in eternity.

She wondered on. Was she protecting herself by not getting too close to people? No, those losses simply reinforced how she behaved toward others. She’d been this way most of her life. No wonder her classmates didn’t reach out to stay in contact with her. She thought on but could come up with no scenario that caused her to distrust people at first. There was nothing she could put her finger on. Maybe when she was old and gray she would discover why she was that way.

For now, she had to accept that it was just how she was. Whatever the reason, the outcome was that Jo made friends slowly and carefully. She supposed that trait was why she now stood alone in her father’s house, separated from