“It’s in the drawer in the kitchen. My mom found it a few years ago. She stuck it in there. I saw it just last night. Wow, the memories…”
“You should tell him that,” I prompt.
The smile drops from her face. “He wouldn’t care.”
“I think he’d care more than you think.”
She shakes her head. “He wouldn’t. He’s not like that anymore.”
“Like what?” I ask her.
“He just wouldn’t look at the past fondly,” she says. She shrugs. “That’s all.”
“Oh, I dunno… He might surprise you.”
I watch as Eli walks backward slowly, stepping away from us. He walks around the corner and out of sight.
“I used to love him so much.” Her voice is rough, like sandpaper scratchy.
“I think you still do.”
She shakes her head. “We’ve been through too much. There are too many bad memories.”
I lean forward and put my hand on her leg so I can get her attention. “There are good memories too, Bess. You’re just choosing not to remember them.”
“There are a lot more bad memories than good memories,” she insists, and she gets up, dusts off the butt of her jeans, and walks away from me. At the last minute she walks back, plucks the pink glasses from my face, and puts them on. “These are mine,” she says.
She walks away from me again, and she leaves me sitting in the dirt with the box, wondering what it’s going to take to make her see all that she’s giving up. What am I going to have to do?
17
Eli
Bess storms around the corner of the house with a pair of pink sunglasses resting on her nose. They look vaguely familiar from long ago. What’s not familiar is the amount of sass that’s oozing off her in waves. For years, Bess has been living in a fog, almost devoid of emotion. She hasn’t smiled, and she didn’t even care enough to get angry about anything, or at least that’s what I thought. But right now, she’s definitely angry.
“Everything okay?” I ask as she stalks past me.
She says nothing and just stomps past me and up the steps. She goes inside the house and slams the door behind her.
I look down at Sam and she grins at me. “Somebody seriously peed in her cornflakes,” she says. She holds her kitten in one hand while she pets it with the other.
I can’t hold back a loud laugh. It bursts from my throat, and then more want to follow but I hold them back. Bess never liked for people to laugh at her, much less when she was angry.
“You sound just like your mother when you say things like that,” I tell Sam. She beams up at me from beneath the brim of her pink fishing cap. I can’t see her eyes, but her grin says it all. I sit down on the top step of the cabin and adjust Miles so that he’s sitting more on my legs. Babies get heavy after a little while. I never knew that. “Your mom always called it like she saw it.”
Her face scrunches up. “What does that mean?”
“Some people like to beat around the bush.”
“Huh?” She stares at me, still petting her kitten.
“Your mom didn’t pull any punches.”
Her brow furrows. “I wish grownups would just say what they mean.”
I think about it. She’s right. I’m using euphemisms that she doesn’t understand. I say my next words very slowly and clearly. “Some people, when they want to call someone out about something, say something nice to ease some of the offense or unpleasantness. Your mother never did that. If it was in her head, it was coming out of her mouth. I never had to worry about what your mother was thinking.” I chuckle at the memory. “One time, your mom and I were walking down to the game room so we could meet up with Bess and your dad, and this other kid rode by us on his bike and got so close to Bess that she had to step out of the road to get out of the way.
She scratches her knee. “What did my mom do?”