The Inheritance (8)

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…