don’t have a picture of him.”
Matthew has a quizzical look on his face.
“My dad. I don’t have any photographs of him so I have no idea what he looked like.”
Matthew reaches over and holds my right shoulder.
“Well all you have to do is look at yourself in the mirror, son. He looked exactly like you.”
Ella and Sally catch up with us now, and they’re smiling about something.
“Isn’t this just special?” Sally comments and brushes up against me. I have to force myself to smile at her. “We are so happy to have you, honey,” she adds, and when I look at her, she beams.
“I’m going to go back home and get started on dinner. Jerry and his wife are coming over with the kids. They are all very excited to see you,” she adds.
“I’ll go with you and help,” Ella offers.
12
Ella
My heart aches a little as I look around the dinner table. Everyone is here. Sally, Matthew, their son Jerry, and his wife Christie, and their two boys Luke and Liam. Reed is in the center of it, and even though he isn’t overly social, is it just my imagination that maybe he’s enjoying himself?
They are filling his plate up with food, asking him a million questions about the car industry and carefully and politely avoiding the subject of his time in foster care. I can also sense that they really like me, which is another thing that is somewhat upsetting—because they are happy about us being a couple.
Every time I find myself really getting sucked into a conversation with one of them, I have to remind myself this is all temporary. Once this weekend is over, we will return to Chicago and neither of us will ever see them again.
Reed seems to have already made his decision. He doesn’t want to be a part of this family, and I get it: he is still angry about his past. But it wasn’t Matthew’s fault, not any of their faults. I know that if they had any idea what was really going on, they would have welcomed Reed with open arms.
On our walk back to the house, Sally and I spoke a little. She told me Matthew had tried very hard to keep in touch with Annie shortly after the accident. When she hadn’t shown up for Dan’s funeral here in Bridgeville, her own husband, they assumed she was just depressed and needed some time to get over the tragedy. As far as they knew, she had made a full recovery.
But she never returned their phone calls. When Matthew went looking for her in Chicago a few months later, he had no idea where she was. She had already moved out of the apartment they used to live in.
Apparently, they kept trying for several years, every few months, trying to look for Annie and Reed, but it was like they had disappeared into thin air. It had never occurred to them that Reed would have been forced into the system. Even Sally is convinced that Annie is still alive and she just gave up her son instead of looking after him.
While I helped Sally bake the lasagna for dinner, she had turned to me, reaching for my hands and holding them tightly.
“You are taking care of him, aren’t you, dear?” she’d asked. “I can’t even begin to imagine what his childhood was like. We would have loved him like a son if only we knew.”
I hadn’t been able to say anything when I saw the tears in Sally’s eyes. Instead, I’d just nodded.
And now I see her staring lovingly at Reed while he discusses baseball and the Chicago cubs with Matthew and Jerry. It breaks my heart to know she is going to lose him again. But I don’t know how to make Reed stay. How to convince him that getting to know his family will be good for him.
Christie, Sally, and I are washing the dishes and putting them away after dinner. Jerry, Reed, and Matthew are playing video games with the boys in the living room where we can see them.
“It’s like we have always known him,” Christie murmurs, looking over her shoulder at Reed. Then she turns to me with a grin. “You’re a lucky woman!”
I blush and continue with the washing.
“I mean Jerry is great and my soulmate and all that, but where did the good-looking genes go?” she says, and that makes Sally laugh too. I am beginning to fall in love with how light-hearted and