wear before. She's even wearing blush and curls in her hair.
“You look beautiful,” I say, putting my hands up to my cheeks to admire her.
“I clean up well, huh?”
“You always look good, but you look really stunning tonight.”
“Quit lying,” Libby says, her cheeks turning red.
She was never the type to accept compliments easily. When her husband comes out, I can see it in his eyes that he thinks that she's the most beautiful woman in the world.
As soon as they leave, Kylie points at the television, asking me to turn on Dora the Explorer.
“On?” I ask, putting one hand over the other to show her the sign.
She nods but I repeat myself and then show her how to do the gesture on her own.
“On?” I ask again and this time she does the sign so I flip it on.
Carolyn shows me her collection of stuffed bears and some of her other favorite toys. All while watching the show, Kylie lines up her cars and trucks and makes a loud growling sound while playing with them, pointing to me to say the word.
Her communication is improving by leaps and bounds and I no longer suspect that she is on the autism spectrum. In fact, her problem seems to be entirely due to an oral motor delay.
After playing with the girls for a while, I leave them alone to play by themselves and plop down on the couch for some me time.
I've known them long enough to know that the peace and tranquility that they are exhibiting in this moment are not going to last long so I want to savor the few moments that I do have.
Next to the end table, I see a huge stack of magazines. Libby has always loved reading something glossy and she subscribes to a whole variety of them.
I skim through some of the celebrity ones and then turn my attention to location based ones. There's one called Mountain House Living with a big sprawling cabin on the cover. I can't bring myself to look through this one because it reminds me too much of Big Bear, California.
Of course the house was nothing like this one, but the view of the lake and the thick pine trees brings me back immediately to the last place where I was with Tyler.
Instead, I turn my attention to Coast Magazine. There's a beautiful house right on the Pacific with enormous boulders framing it on both sides. I've never been to the Pacific Northwest, but I've always wanted to go. The trees there are perpetually evergreen and never stand barren and naked like they do here for months at a time.
I go through the pages from the back, an old habit of mine, but for some reason I find it easier to turn the pages this way. Somewhere in the middle, right after the big advertisement for an expensive new sailboat, I stumble upon an article about a marina sale in Seattle.
Apparently, it was an institution that has been around since the 50s and the father refused to give it to his family and instead sold it to an outside party.
The writer is eloquent and concise, taking some leeway with language in order to create a better story. Normally, reading something like this is nothing that I'm really interested in and yet I can't pull myself away. It is intriguing and a mystery, yet there isn't really a resolution.
When the article ends, I want to know more, but I don't think that there will be a follow-up. In the end, Oliver Beckett is someone who takes over the marina, leaving the three Elliott brothers to fend for themselves.
Of course, I doubt that there's any risk they will actually get any real jobs as the family has other real estate and wealth buildup over the decades, but they are definitely not taking the sale lightly. In fact, they're working with their attorneys to try to get their father declared incompetent, which would probably invalidate the sale.
When I finish the story, instead of simply moving on to something else, I sit with my legs in the lotus position on the couch with the magazine flat in my lap and think about what I have just read.
It's fascinating how the story told a particular way that just draws you into it. I flip back to the beginning to look at the writer's name: Emma Scott. Her prose is terse yet full of imagination and she is an amazing storyteller. There are a few