would be her apartment. Twisting around, she sought Charley. “I want to see if Charley was born with the pink hair.”
Her friend made a face and dropped down into the couch while Val laid a hand on her arm to lean past her and pick up a picture. Just the girls in that one. The babies, she guessed, were the twins, maybe a few days old. They’d lose their father not long after that picture was taken.
“Charley,” Val said, pointing at the second girl.
“Faye and Zoey,” Poppy said, touching the other two girls. She smiled at Val. “But I can’t tell the twins apart.”
“Sometimes we still can’t,” Charley said in the background.
“Autumn,” Val said of one baby.
“So that makes Willow the one left,” Poppy said, admiring the picture as she put it back. “You have a beautiful family.”
“We’re sickly gorgeous,” Charley said. “We should show her the home movies.”
Grinning, Poppy couldn’t contain herself. “I would love that… And you have to show me his room.”
“Everyone’s room is everyone’s room in this house… except Mom’s, she’s always been in the same room,” Charley said, pulling the tie from her hair to let the neon locks flow around her shoulders. “There are four bedrooms upstairs.”
Val guided Poppy over to the couch by Charley and then sat in a perpendicular armchair. “I always wanted a big family, but didn’t think we’d ever be able to afford a house for them. Ed told me that was his department.” Val’s secret smile warmed Poppy. “One day he takes me out, I think we’re going for dinner, but we’re driving and driving…” She opened her arms, laying one on each side of the chair. “He brings me here.”
Charley leaned in. “It was a dive.”
“It wasn’t even a whole house,” Val said, her smile growing. “There were holes in the roof. The electrics were shot, pipes leaking in the walls… animals nesting in the basement. He told me he bought it.”
“Any other woman would run a million miles,” Charley said. “Not Mom.”
“I loved it,” Val said. “Al sold his place and moved in with us, he poured all he had into this house… We did a few big repairs and then…”
“Turner,” Charley said, finishing her mom’s story. “Arrived long before they were ready.”
“He arrived when he was ready,” Val said to her daughter. “As he always does…”
Charley grinned. “That’s why there’s a gap between him and Faye. They learned about birth control.”
“Oh, Charley,” Val said. “Spontaneity was never your problem, dearest. Commitment is your problem.”
“I’m committed,” Charley said, tossing her arms over the back of the couch and pouncing to a crouch on the seat. “To being committed.”
Val just drew her eyes away from her daughter to smile at Poppy again. “So it started with me and Ed in our room, Al in his, and when Turner was big enough, he had a room to himself. We were still fixing the place up when Faye came along. In an ideal world, it would’ve been done before we started the family, but Turner was getting older and we didn’t want him to miss out on having a sibling.”
“Him and Faye are always barking at each other,” Charley groaned. “I don’t think he was happy that you brought Faye home.”
“The two of them are alike, very alike,” Val said, folding the towel onto her lap. “There are six years between them.” She inhaled. “Then Mistress Charley over there arrived… Which Turner loved because we told him and Faye one of them would have to share with the baby, depending if it was a boy or a girl. So Faye and Charley shared for a while.”
“Then another girl,” Charley said, unhooking her arms from the back of the couch. “So Turner got his own floor.”
“He did the work himself,” Val said like she’d heard the complaints a thousand times. She tipped her head to Poppy to explain. “He converted the basement into his room. By then he’d been working on the Venture for years. He was always handy.”
“So Faye got Turner’s room and I had to share with Zoey.”
Poppy loved the family tale. How concessions were made, arguments dealt, and dispensed, with. She’d grown up with her choice of bedrooms and hadn’t thought anything of it. Maybe that was why she wasn’t close to her sisters, they could’ve had their own building if they made a big enough deal of it to their father. In fact, he was building a guest house on estate land because he wanted to keep