The car
radio was announcing a new and improved scrubbing pad guaranteed to get dishes
cleaner, quicker and easier. In the back
seat Mike and Debbie’s two children sat still, one engrossed in the electronic
device in his hands, the other watching out the window. Mike, accustomed to the nuances of his
children’s silences, felt some apprehension about the day’s outing. His daughter, Beth, was just one year old
when his sister moved away and wouldn’t have any memory of her aunt and uncle
or her cousins, but his son, Matt, was the same age as Lily’s oldest daughter
and had been close to his cousin. At the
tender age of seven they were inseparable, sharing an interest in animals,
forts and cooking, dreaming up games to play with their own set of rules. He took his cousin’s moving away hard, not
speaking to his father for a long time.
Mike had let time soothe his son’s hurt, slowly reestablishing their
relationship around the outdoors and sports.
Mike
wondered how meeting up with his cousin as a teenager would go, wondered if
they would reconnect or just vaguely acknowledge each other as members of the
same family as he did with the rest of his family and wondered if he would lose
the connection with his son he had worked so hard to gain.
As for his
daughter, it never crossed his mind she knew much about the family history or
the events of his parents death and his sister’s leave-taking. She was a quiet child, often sitting
unnoticed in the same room as the adults in her life as they talked about
things they thought were not appropriate for young ears. Over the years Debbie had reached out to
Mike’s sister Lisa as a way of maintain family connections bringing her
daughter and Lisa’s daughter together, encouraging them to form a close
friendship, spending time at each other houses until they were almost
inseparable. Although she often brought
her son with her, he remained distant from everyone in his family, unwilling or
unable to get past his cousin’s leaving. Mike had not been as keen as his wife to keep
in contact with his one sister, but didn’t feel he had a good argument to keep
the two families apart, so said nothing against it. And yet if he knew how much his daughter knew
or how much she thought she knew but had misunderstood in her eavesdropping activities,
he would be a lot less willing to join Lily and Lisa at the lake.
The sign
announcing the entrance to the park came into view and Mike turned off the
radio while Debbie opened her purse to fish out the entrance fee. In the back seat, unseen by her parents, Beth
turned away from the window and looked down at the object in her hands. A book’s dust jacket showed a picture of a horse
running free across open grassland, leading anyone who noticed to think a book
about horses was exactly the kind of book an eleven-year-old girl would enjoy
reading, and not consider a dust jacket could cover up the presence of
something entirely different.
To Be
Continue…
