Heart Like Mine A Novel - By Amy Hatvany Page 0,66

You were the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Swallowing the lump in my throat, I opened the album to the first page, and Max reached over Grace’s lap to point at a picture of an unsmiling little girl who stood in front of a red brick house. She wore a plain, dark blue dress and her blond hair was pulled into a ponytail at her neck. What looked like dead shrubs grew up around her, right out of the dusty ground.

“Who’s that?” Max asked.

I scrunched my eyes up to read the tiny letters written on the white edge of the photo—“Kelli, three years old,” I said, then looked at Max. “It’s Mama.” I scanned the other photos on the two open pages, then flipped through a couple more, taking in the images in front of me. “These are all of Mama growing up.” There were pictures of her standing with her mother—a wisp of a woman with dirty-blond hair and heavy lines across her forehead; an image or two of her father resting his large hand on her small shoulder. He was a tall, grim-looking man with blond, slicked-back hair and black-rimmed glasses. His white, short-sleeved shirt was buttoned all the way to the top, and the wobbly skin of his neck was pinched with a bow tie. There was Mama standing in front of a church in a long white dress, a lacy cap pinned in her hair, with the words, “Kelli, first communion,” written on the picture’s edge.

“She never showed us these before,” Max said, and as he did, Dad approached us and sat down on the chair next to the couch.

“Never showed you what?” he asked.

Grace smiled at him. “One of the albums I brought from Kelli’s house.”

“It has pictures of Mama when she was little,” Max said, and just as he did, my eyes landed on a picture of Mama that had “Kelli, 13,” written in spidery script on its edge. We almost could have been twins, only Mama had blond hair and mine was dark. But our bodies were the same, slight and skinny, all elbows and knobby knees. She sat on a white wicker chair, holding a thick book in her lap. Her mouth was smiling, but her eyes were not. We turned a few more pages of the album, seeing more pictures of Mama around my age, looking unhappy and dark, and I thought about the pictures Bree and I took with our cell phones—goofy shots of both of us making faces or puckering our lips and pretending to be glamorous. There was nothing like that here. Maybe Mama had never had many friends. Maybe her life was just so miserable with her parents that she had to leave. There was something so plain about her in these pictures, so the opposite of the woman I watched spend an hour straightening her hair and carefully applying her makeup. The woman who wore tight blue jeans and knee-high, black leather boots.

“Why didn’t she ever show us these?” I asked Dad, then swallowed to ease the cottony feel in my mouth. I kept my eyes on the album, afraid I might miss something if I looked away.

Dad sighed. “Probably because she didn’t like talking about her past very much, honey. It was hard for her.”

I turned another page, stopping short when I saw the last ten pages or so were blank. The pictures just stopped after the ones of her at fourteen. I finally looked over to my dad. “Did you ever see any from when she was in high school? When she was a cheerleader?”

Dad shook his head. “I don’t think so, sweetie.”

“But why would they just stop?” I asked. “You guys have tons from when you met and got married. And tons from when me and Max were babies. Why wouldn’t she have any from when she was a teenager?”

“I guess because she didn’t take any with her when she left California,” he said. “Her parents probably still have them.”

“But she has this one,” I said, giving the album a little shake. “Why wouldn’t she have taken those, too?”

“I don’t know, Ava. Okay?” His voice held a sharp edge, one I’d heard him use on Mama more than once. Grace reached out to touch his hand. He took a couple of deep breaths, his face softening almost immediately when she touched him. I wondered why Mama never reached out to him like that when he was angry, instead of screaming or crying