This Lifetime. | Edward Heffron

I.

Amelia sat lost in thought, her fingers drumming silently against the old oak table. Her eyes gazed longingly towards the horizon, the stretch of green fields, and the brilliant summer sun. A familiar voice was humming softly, a little grunt here and there whenever her finger got pricked by the needle firmly pinched between her index finger and her thumb. Amelia sighed, her lip jutting out in a little pout.

"Honeybunch," her grandmother's gentle voice resonated through the room as she placed the cloth she was working on on the table beside her, "You don't need to sigh to let me know you're upset." The young woman turned her head, before slumping back down onto the table.

"Nana, how do you always know?" Amelia asked, the same question she always had since she was a little girl. Her grandma had raised her since she was a small child, as her mother passed during childbirth, and her father simply left.

"That's my job, Amelia," she smiled knowingly. Tapping her legs, she urged her to move closer, "What's on your mind?"

The young woman stood, turning off the stove and taking the whistling pot to pour her grandmother a cup of tea. Her grandmother always had a cup of rosehip tea before bed, two cubes of sugar and a bit of milk. "He asked me to move away with him," she paused as she dropped the two cubes of sugar into the mug, "to New Jersey."

"Well?" the elderly woman smiled expectantly, "Tell me you said yes, dear."

Amelia scoffed, "Of course not! Nana, I can't leave you here alone."

Her grandmother scoffed back, the perfect mirror image of her granddaughter, "I'm not alone. I've got the knitting club!" Though she tried to joke, she saw the young woman's face fall, "Honeybunch, thank you for all that you do for me." She stroked Amelia's hair gently as she handed her grandmother her cup of tea. Settling back down on her rocking chair, placing her warm mug on her side table, she pat the armrest of her chair, urging her granddaughter to sit at her feet like she always did whenever she was sad. "Come here, dear. I have a story for you."

"It was the summer of 1940..."