Once I was done, I put the envelope into a notebook and left it on my desk. After hopping back on my bed, I began to flip through the pictures again.
My aunt came to my door and knocked twenty minutes later.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
I sat up straighter in bed, glancing briefly at my desk. The envelope was well hidden. “Sure.”
She walked into the room and took a seat at the foot of my bed. “Did you find any other good pictures?” she asked.
I picked up the stack and began flipping through them again. I came to a photo of me with my aunt, uncle, and dad taken at a family gathering. Both me and my aunt had our hair up with a scrunchie. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m not so sure the scrunchie was a good look though.”
I handed her the picture with a smile. She took it and laughed to herself. “Those things really were terrible. God, look at us all. So young. I need to show this to your uncle.”
I nodded, and we sat in silence. Finally, I got the nerve to ask the question that had been on my mind all morning. “So what’s the real reason you don’t have any pictures of my dad up?”
She pursed her lips and looked away for a second. Her face was set in stone by the time she looked back. “When your father . . . when Bill did what he did, I was angry. I couldn’t believe he would leave his family behind like that. It’s just . . . not what people do.”
I had to bite my tongue, but I kept silent.
She looked back at the picture. “As a family, you have to stay together. Through anything. Even if it’s terrible, like what happened with your poor mother. Everyone needs to be an anchor for everyone else.”
A tear fell from her eye, but she continued talking with a steady voice. “Anyway, I’m glad you brought the pictures up. Even if he did what he did, he’s still a part of the family, and we can’t abandon him or his memory. He doesn’t deserve that.”
She paused a moment and pressed her lips together.
“When I think about it, I wish I had done more to reach out to him. He was always an obsessively focused person. In the end I guess it killed him—and it was bad for his marriage, of course—but he did accomplish an awful lot.”
Tears began threatening to come from my eyes, but I fought them back as well as I could. I didn’t want my aunt to stop talking, even if the mention of my parents’ marriage made me upset.
“He was always focused on something,” she said with a sigh. She looked back at the picture again. “Maybe something positive to focus on would help you move on too.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, not completely convinced.
She smiled. “I’m going to go downstairs and start on lunch. That boy Hunter eats like a horse. Will you be coming down?”
“Yeah, I’ll be down in a minute.”
She nodded and walked out. I watched her go and thought about what she’d said.
I threw the covers off and swung my feet around to get out of bed. Everyone in a family needed to be an anchor for everyone else. Had my family been like that?
Probably not. But the Perkins family was welcoming me in and they were family too. Maybe I wasn’t pulling my weight yet, but I could work on it.
What about Hunter? I had felt like he was my anchor, but after the last few weeks maybe I needed to be more careful about that. He needed me to be his anchor as much as I needed him. We had certainly made progress, but we weren’t fully there yet.
I looked at my desk, where I had hidden the letter to Marco. Maybe if I could get some answers about why everything had happened, I could be a better anchor for Hunter too.
Chapter Eight
HELP
I snuck a stamp from the kitchen drawer my aunt kept them in and sent the letter off the next morning. Before I was ready, it was Saturday evening. Hunter had spent most of the past two days working on the dining room. Even though we hadn’t talked alone since he’d found me in the basement, his presence in the house was comforting.
I helped my aunt with the dishes after dinner while Hunter read to the kids in the living room. From the sound of it, there was little actual reading being done, and a whole lot of chasing the kittens.
“Sounds like the boys are having fun,” I said.
My aunt let out a hearty laugh. “Having Hunter around is like having an older brother for them to play with. They haven’t had this much fun since I can remember.”
I giggled. Hunter was just like a big boy, in his own way. It wasn’t surprising my cousins got along with him so well.
After a few minutes of raucous laughter in the living room, the noise in the living room died down. Aunt Caroline raised an eyebrow at me. “Do you hear that?”