offered.
“Are you married?” I asked her, glad to talk about her.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m married to a wonderful man named Ed, short for Edward and we have a one and a half-year-old daughter.”
I grinned, my spirits suddenly lifted. “You mean to say that I actually have a niece?”
She laughed. “Yes, you’ll love Kacy. She’s adorable.”
“I can’t wait to meet her,” I said and abruptly stopped speaking. I was making a lot of assumptions. What if Helen just wanted to meet me, satisfy her curiosity and move on with her life?
“I can’t wait for you to meet her,” she said, to my relief.
It was odd to think that the woman seated next to me was my sister and yet we knew so little about each other.
“And Ed too. We’re high school sweethearts and we always knew that we wanted to get married,” Helen said. She seemed so put together and her life so organized. “You’re married too?”
I smiled. Alex was the one good thing in my life. “Yes. His name is Alex and he’s a wonderful man.”
“The Evans sisters are blessed,” she said and it took a moment to realize that she was referring to the two of us.
My chest swelled with emotion. There was something about Helen that made it easy to ask her questions. “What is his family like?”
“My in-laws?” she asked and when I nodded, she continued. “They are the loveliest people you’d ever meet. It helped that we knew each other for years and both sets of parents knew that we were going to get married.”
“That’s nice,” I said and wondered if Alex’s parents would have accepted me if I’d been adopted rather than raised by a drug addict.
“What about you? Did you get a whole new family when you and Alex got married?”
I made a face. “I wish. Unfortunately, no. I wasn’t the kind of girl they had envisioned for their son, so they more or less cut us out of their lives.”
Helen’s mouth fell open. “What horrible people!”
“I thought so at first but now I’m getting a better understanding. He’s their only son and they had such great hopes for him which included marrying a girl from their kind of world. They probably just hoped to frighten him and when it didn’t work, they didn’t know how to heal the rift.”
She stared at me. “You’re a really good person. You raised yourself well.”
That made me laugh because it was so on point. I really had raised myself. I worked hard and got myself scholarships. Everything would have been perfect if Alex’s family was in our lives.
“They’ll come around,” she said. “Especially when a grandchild comes along. They won’t be able to resist it.”
“You think?” I said.
She nodded. “Grandkids are impossible to resist.”
Charlotte
Alex and I had started talking about kids. It would be a tight squeeze with his schedule, but I really wanted a baby. A family of my own.
Helen and I talked and talked. I asked her about our father and she too had no idea.
Our stomachs were the first to complain. We got up and walked to a hot dog stand at the entrance of the park. It was fun to realize that we both liked loads of mayonnaise slathered on our hotdogs and no mustard.
We returned to our bench and spoke for a couple of more hours.
“Hey,” she said. “Can you guys come over tomorrow for a barbecue. We usually have a barbecue every last Sunday of the month.”
“Yes!” I said. “I’d love to meet your family.”
“And I’d love to meet Alex. You talk about him a lot. He must be very special,” Helen said. “Not to mention a man who chose his fiancée over threats from his family.”
“He is,” I said. My muscles ached from sitting down for so long. I walked Helen to her car and we hugged goodbye.
It felt good to know that I would be seeing her the following day. Only after she’d gone and I was walking home, did I realize that I had forgotten to take pictures of us to show Alex.
Alex had opted to go to the office rather than stay home alone. I got home as he parked his car in the drive and we walked into the house together.
“How was it?” he asked.
There was so much to tell him. We cuddled on the couch as I told him everything Helen and I had talked about, including the invitation to go to their house the following day for the barbecue.
“What do you think?” I said,