“I mean it, Kristin. We don’t want to insert any darkness into this holiday and our time together.” She reached over to squeeze my hand gently.
I nodded again, and we got out and brought everything into the house. I really worked at not showing how disturbed I was, even though I was still trembling a little inside. Right before our dinner, Kane called to tell me how things were going at his house. Relatives had arrived for the next day’s Thanksgiving “extravaganza,” as he called it.
“Darlena, Julio, and I are going out for Chinese. My mother’s not happy about it, but my father said it would be all right. All three of us feel like sailors getting liberty at a port.” He laughed. “How’s it going there?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to burst out with everything my aunt Barbara had told me and tell him that our reading the diary together would have to end, but I was afraid to do so. His commitment to it and how seriously he was taking it, especially now, convinced me he would take it very badly. I had no
idea how that would turn out, but I was positive it would be worse than things were now.
“Everything okay?” he asked after I described my day with my aunt. He could hear some worry in my voice, I was sure.
“Yes,” I said quickly. “Say hello to your sister and Julio for me, and have a good Thanksgiving.”
“It can’t be good without you,” he said. Kane wasn’t one to layer on smooth talk with me or with anyone else. I knew he sincerely believed what he said. I didn’t respond the way most people would and automatically say the same thing.
“Maybe next year, we’ll celebrate together,” I suggested, and immediately wondered if people our age really ever thought or talked in terms of the future with each other. In our case, we surely wouldn’t be attending the same college. No matter how intense our feelings for each other were at the moment, would they survive time and distance and, maybe more important, socializing with others? Did romances like ours simply thin out until they broke? In the beginning, did we flood every free moment with phone calls and letters and then slowly wind them down, subtly bringing it to an end?
“Sure,” Kane said. “As long as your father prepares the dinner.”
I had to laugh at that. He would prepare the dinner for sure.
“I’ll see you Sunday, right?” Kane said.
“Right. I’ll call you with our schedule for the day.”
Later that evening, after we had eaten, we sat and talked in the living room, where my father went on about the project at Foxworth and showed Aunt Barbara the plans. Then I went up to my room, intending to go right to sleep. Aunt Barbara surprised me, however, and knocked on my door just after I had gotten into my pajamas.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” I said, a little surprised.
“I wanted to be sure I didn’t disturb you with what I told you in your car earlier,” she began.
“It’s okay. I’m fine with forgetting about it.”
She gazed about my room, smiling at my collection of dolls on a shelf and some of my movie posters, then paused to look at pictures of my mother and my father when they were first married. “I remember their wedding as if it happened yesterday,” she said. “We used to worry about your father finding someone who could make him happy. He was always so demanding, expecting so much of people he said he ‘invested in.’ Then she came along and turned him into a softy.”
“He’s still a softy, but only with me,” I said.
She nodded. “He’s really excited about this project. I guess it’s the biggest thing he’s done.”
“Yes.”
She paused, looking like she was afraid to say anything more. What more was she going to tell me?
“What, Aunt Barbara?” I asked, smiling.
“I was curious and wondering if you would show me that diary. I don’t want to read it all, just look at it.”
“Sure,” I said, and slipped it out from under my pillow.
She widened her eyes at that. “That’s where you keep it?”
“I did the first night and just kept doing it.”
I handed it to her, and she took it gingerly, treating it like some historical parchment. I watched her open the cover and skim the first page. “So old, and yet it hasn’t been damaged by the weather.”
“It was in a metal box,” I said.