Once Cold

Both girls and their mother looked happy.

Riley couldn’t remember when or where the picture had been taken.

And she certainly couldn’t remember her family ever being happy.

Her hands cold and shaking, she typed Wendy’s video address on her keyboard.

The woman who appeared on the screen might as well have been a perfect stranger.

“Hi, Wendy,” Riley said shyly.

“Hi,” Wendy replied.

They sat staring at each other dumbly for a few awkward moments.

Riley knew that Wendy was about fifty, some ten years older than her. She seemed to wear her years pretty well. She was a bit heavyset and looked thoroughly conventional. Her hair didn’t appear to be graying like Riley’s. But Riley doubted that it was her natural color.

Riley glanced back and forth between the picture and Wendy’s face. She noticed that Wendy looked a little like their mother. Riley knew that she looked more like their father. She wasn’t especially proud of the resemblance.

“Well,” Wendy finally said to break the silence. “What have you been up to … during the last few decades?”

Riley and Wendy both laughed a little. Even their laughter felt strained and awkward.

Wendy asked, “Are you married?”

Riley sighed aloud. How could she explain what was going on between her and Ryan when she didn’t even know herself?

She said, “Well, as the kids say these days, ‘It’s complicated.’ And I do mean really complicated.”

There was a bit more nervous laughter.

“And you?” Riley asked.

Wendy seemed to be starting to relax a little.

“Loren and I are coming up on our twenty-fifth anniversary. We’re both pharmacists, and we own our own drugstore. Loren inherited it from his father. We’ve got three kids. The youngest, Barton, is away at college. Thora and Parish are both married and on their own. I guess that makes Loren and me your classic empty-nesters.”

Riley felt a strange pang of melancholy.

Wendy’s life had been nothing at all like hers. In fact, Wendy’s life had apparently been completely normal.

Just as she had with April over dinner, she again had the feeling of looking in the mirror.

Except this mirror wasn’t of her past.

It was of a future self – someone she once might have become, but now would never, ever be.

“What about you?” Wendy asked. “Any kids?”

Again, Riley felt tempted to say …

“It’s complicated.”

Instead, she said, “Two. I’ve got a fifteen-year-old, April. And I’m in the process of adopting another – Jilly, who’s thirteen.”

“Adoption! More people should do that. Good for you.”

Riley didn’t feel like she deserved to be congratulated at the moment. She might feel better if she could be sure that Jilly would grow up in a two-parent family. Right now, that issue was in doubt. But Riley decided not to go into all that with Wendy.

Instead, there was some business she needed to discuss with her sister.

And she was afraid it might be awkward.

“Wendy, you know that Daddy left me his cabin in his will,” she said.

Wendy nodded.

“I know,” she said. “You sent me some pictures. It looks like a nice place.”

The words were a bit jarring …

“… a nice place.”

Riley had been there a few times – most recently after her father died. But her memories of it were far from pleasant. Her father had bought it when he retired as a US Marine colonel. Riley remembered it as the home of a lonely, mean old man who hated just about everybody – and a man that just about everybody hated in return. The last time Riley had seen him alive, they had actually come to blows.

“I think it was a mistake,” she said.

“What was?”

“Leaving the cabin to me. It was wrong for him to do that. It should have gone to you.”

Wendy looked genuinely surprised.

“Why?” she asked.

Riley felt all kinds of ugly emotions welling up inside her. She cleared her throat.

“Because you were with him at the end, when he was in hospice. You took care of him. You even took care of everything afterwards – his funeral and all the legal stuff. I wasn’t there. I – ”

She almost choked on her next words.

“I don’t think I could have done that. Things weren’t good between us.”

Wendy smiled sadly.

“Things weren’t good between him and me either.”

Riley knew it was true. Poor Wendy – Daddy had beaten her regularly until at last she ran away for good at the age of fifteen. And yet Wendy had shown the decency to take care of Daddy at the end.