The Calendar Girls

After Molly Baker's husband died suddenly, her friends organized a year's worth of support

- Sarah Chassé

The date was March 24, 2018, and though Molly Baker didn't know it yet, her world was about to change forever. On that cloudy Saturday morning, she'd just returned to her home in Sammamish, Washington, after a chilly trail run. Her husband, Marlin Baker, an avid skier, had set out early for a day on the slopes of Crystal Mountain, about two hours away. Their 14-year-old son, Samuel, was at a friend's house.

Molly, then 52, was catching up on her work as an accountant when her cellphone rang. She didn't recognize the number, so she ignored it. Then came a voicemail from the Crystal Mountain Volunteer Ski Patrol: Marlin had been in a skiing accident. Her heart fluttering, she immediately called back. Her husband had been killed.

In that moment, Molly remembers falling to her knees and just screaming.

“My life was completely turned upside down. Everything that I knew, that I counted on, was just blown apart,” she says. They'd been married almost 20 years; he was 59. “What do I do?” she remembers saying aloud, in total shock. “What do I do?”

WHEN CARLA VAIL, one of Molly's closest friends, heard the awful news about Marlin, she knew right away that she wanted to help. Carla and Molly had met 10 years earlier in the pickup line at their sons' preschool.

“I'd been hearing nonstop about this boy named Samuel, and Molly had been hearing nonstop about this boy named Jake. And we were like, ‘Oh my gosh, you're the mother of the child I hear about every single day!’” Carla remembers. “We just hit it off.”

They had a lot in common—they both volunteered in the community and loved cooking and hiking. Their two boys already got along, and their husbands became friendly too.

“We had a lot of threads in our lives that brought us together and kept us together over the years,” Molly says.