The Grove Where Nicole Waited is a fiction memory tale shaped by real grief, childhood friendship, small-town tragedy, and the kind of love that keeps calling across decades.
In 1988, five girls from Pulaski, Wisconsin, lost their lives in a terrible car accident: Nicole Watia, Laura Karcz, Jodi Prokop, Brenda Hylok, and Jessica McKeefry. They were classmates, teammates, daughters, sisters, friends, singers, poets, athletes, and ordinary girls under a Wisconsin sky before tragedy made them a headline.
For M.K. Spryte, the loss was not distant history. Nicole and Jodi were her best friends. Their deaths marked her childhood, fractured her sense of safety, and became part of the grief she carried through running away, family rupture, addiction, recovery, survival, and the long search for meaning.
Thirty-seven years later, living in Texas, Spryte opens the old box of memory again: photographs, memorial programs, newspaper clippings, names, dates, and the ache that never fully left. What begins as remembrance becomes something deeper. In dreams, signs, and sacred imagination, the girls return as trees in a grove where the dead are no longer separated by roads, cemeteries, and time.
Nicole becomes willow.
Jodi becomes apple.
Laura becomes oak.
Brenda becomes cedar.
Jessie becomes birch.
The grove is not an escape from grief. It is the place where grief is allowed to breathe. It is where a survivor can sit with the shadow, speak to the dead, honor the living, and learn that memory does not have to remain trapped at the roadside.
Part coming-of-age grief story, part magical realism, part love letter to the girls and the town that remembers them, The Grove Where Nicole Waited is a tender and haunting novel about friendship, survivor guilt, community sorrow, feminine rest, and the sacred work of carrying the dead without becoming their grave.
It is said that after an especially exhausting life, some souls return as trees. They spend a hundred years resting. Rooted. Quiet. Undemanded.
This is the grove where five girls rest together.
This is the story it took thirty-seven years to write.
M.K. Spryte is an author, emcee, survivor, and founder of Matriarch Emerges Publishing. She is originally from Pulaski, Wisconsin, and now lives in Texas, where she writes fiction, memoir, spiritual testimony, and Matriarch-centered nonfiction.Spryte holds an associate degree in anthropology and a bachelor's degree in psychology. She also attended Penn State for graduate work and came within two classes of completing her degree before life changed the path.Her work blends grief, survival, scholarship, myth, memory, and the hard-won voice of a woman who stopped asking permission to tell the truth. The Grove Where Nicole Waited is her memory tale for the five girls from Pulaski whose deaths shaped her childhood, her nervous system, and the story she carried for thirty-seven years before finally writing it.
