“She’s your grandmother.”
“A grandmother who never bothered to get in touch with us while she was alive,” I said.
“Think what it must have been like for her,” Stanley replied. “She was barely eighteen, and pregnant, and remember what a stigma that would have been seventy-some years ago.”
“Yes, but times have changed.”
“Times have, but maybe she never did,” he said. “You never know. Maybe if she’d met you she would have.”
“Or maybe not,” I said. “Maybe it’s a good thing Grandfather didn’t start looking for her while she was still alive. I’m having a hard time dealing with the rejection as it is. Can you imagine how bad it would have been if we’d shown up and she had slammed the door in our faces? And however bad I feel about it, I know it’s much, much worse for Dad.”
We fell silent. Not for the first time, I tried to imagine how Dad must be feeling about all this. At times in my life—especially in my teens—I’d been very critical of Mother. She hadn’t always lived up to my vision of an ideal mother, which wasn’t surprising, considering that my idea had been shaped by Little Women, Little House on the Prairie, and The Waltons.
But she’d always been there. Giving me dangly earrings for Christmas instead of the welding set I’d asked for. Critiquing my posture instead of praising my grades. But there, always.
Dad had grown up knowing only his own history, knowing his adopted mother loved him dearly, but with nothing but a big question mark in place of his biological mother. And now to learn that she’d been so close and never bothered to contact us?
A sudden not-so-distant rumble of thunder interrupted my thoughts and made us both glance over at the windows.
“I should head back to my tent,” I said. “Before that breaks. May I borrow this?”
I held up the file on Weaver.
“Be my guest,” he said. “And if you can add to it tomorrow, all the better.”
When I arrived back at the tent, Michael and the boys were still sound asleep. They didn’t even wake up when the big storm hit, a few minutes later, which was lucky, because both boys were a little afraid of thunder and lightning.
Chapter 14
“Mommy! Pancakes!” Josh.
“Ssshhh! Mommy’s sleeping.” Jamie. I’d have called him the considerate one, except that his rebuke was at least twice as loud as his twin’s original remark. I glanced up to see the two of them peeking through the tent flap.
“Mommy will be out in a few minutes,” I said. Both tousled little heads vanished, and I lay back for a moment, trying to remember if I’d packed a comb, and wondering what was it about being a parent that made people start talking about themselves in the third person.
I pulled on the first clothes I could find and stumbled out of the tent.
Dawn. Not ever my favorite time of day, and even less welcome today, given how late I’d been up keeping watch over Annabel, worrying about Grandfather, strategizing with Stanley, and riding out the thunderstorm. I was glad Michael seemed well rested. I planned to let him take the wheel for the drive up to the abandoned emu ranch. My lacerations were throbbing. I’d probably overdone it yesterday, in my efforts to prove I was too tough to let a minor injury slow me down.
Thanks to the high winds that had accompanied the previous night’s thunderstorms, our departure couldn’t take place until a volunteer crew with chain saws removed the several large trees that were blocking the dirt road out of camp.
As I strolled round the camp, checking to see if the storm had caused any other damage, I noticed with dismay that Rose Noire’s beautiful hand-painted tent had collapsed overnight. I hoped she’d find a way to get the mud out without washing out all the decoration. She had festooned it with so many banners, flags, amulets, crystals, and tokens that you’d think even a thunderstorm would take notice and tiptoe around it, instead of flattening it in the wee small hours, forcing her to take refuge in Caroline’s nearby caravan.
Seth Early and two other volunteers were trying to get the tent back in working order, a little hampered by the fact that one of the tent poles had broken and some other part of the tent that they considered essential had never been installed in the first place.
“We need to find a sporting goods store,” Seth was saying. The other two occasionally stopped what they were doing to wave their cell phones in the air.
“Still no signal,” one of them said, after one such break.
“You think anyone’s got a good, old-fashioned paper copy of the Yellow Pages so we could look up the address of the nearest one?” the other man asked.