Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 54645 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 273(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 182(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54645 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 273(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 182(@300wpm)
But his mom was beautiful, sweet, and treated me like her own, even when I bucked against her, willful and rebellious. I needed her love. My own mom died when I wasn’t even two, taking with her part of my heart and my Dad’s, until Emily came along.
I don’t even remember my mom. But there are snapshots of her here, in this album. Cancer took her. A sad death, but quick. It was two months from the day she got the stomachache to the day There were a few years there that I know I was hard to love. Emily was my mom, but I’d had another I didn’t even remember.
Trent and I went through a rough patch at that time too. I wanted nothing to do with him for a while. Nothing. Him with his attitude and his protein shakes, Emily’s real child, putting up posters of rock bands on the bedroom walls, listening to Green Day and Nirvana and being so...Trent.
It was infuriating. I took to stealing things from him. A CD, a flashlight, a magazine with girls in bikinis. Anything to annoy him. Anything to get him to see me.
But when push came to shove, he did see me. He did help me. He did love me in the way that only a brother can.
A few years later, I remember he found me sitting in his room, just staring blankly at the wall. No books, no toys, no stealing his stuff, nothing.
“If it’s that fucker Henry Weaver again, I’m probably going to need a lawyer,” Trent said. Even when I was little, he didn’t sugarcoat things for me. He never treated me as less than an equal. Never acted like I couldn’t handle the way things were.
“Close the door,” I said, waving him closer to the bed.
Trent leaned back on his comforter, laying down, staring at the ceiling and folding his hands on top of his worn Nirvana tee-shirt. “Spill it, Kitty Kat.”
I sniffled. “I think… I think Dad is hurting your mom.” My eyes welled up with tears. That sharp sting of sadness filled my nostrils and throat.
Trent’s blue eyes met my gaze. “What? Why would you say that?”
I felt my lips tremble, but I kept myself from bursting into messy sobs. “I think they were fighting. Last night. Your Mom was making these noises. I tried to look under the door. I could see Dad was holding her down.” The welling tears tumbled down over my cheeks. “I think he was hurting her, Trent.”
Trent took a minute. Half amused. Half thoughtful. Watching me, I know now, and surely thinking, How the fuck do I explain this?
But he handled it well. He handles every difficult thing well. “They weren’t fighting, Kat. He’s not hurting her. I promise.”
He extended his pinkie to mine. At first I was skeptical, but he looked so certain.
“Promise?” I asked, as our fingers squeezed together
“Promise.”
“But what were they doing, then?” I asked. “I saw him, holding her hard. He was grunting, and she was…”
Trent cleared his throat, looked away. He ran his muscular hand down his face. And I remember the sound of his stubble against his palm. “How about we go get an ice cream?”
I blinked at him. “But, Trent…”
“Your dad will explain it to you sometime, Kitty Kat. Not my job. But I promise an ice cream will make you feel better. So?”
It wasn’t like him to change the subject. But even then, I trusted him to tell me what I needed to know. And if he said my dad wasn’t hurting Emily, then I accepted that as the truth.
“So,” I said, like I always did, in our little secret language. “Two scoops?”
Trent rolled off the bed, smiling that devastating smile. “Maybe even three.”
More cellophane pages, more years of memories. One of him at his senior prom, with a little blonde bombshell that looked like a Jazzercise instructor in the making. I hated her back then and a bubble of that old hostility comes up now looking at the picture. He never really had girlfriends that I remember. He had girls as friends, I guess, but nobody seemed to keep his attention. Or capture his heart.
Now the formal portrait of him when he joined the service, looking so sharp and so strong and so sure. Once he joined up, the girls gravitated toward him even more. He was a force of nature and there was never a shortage of girls waiting to take his arm.
But, he never looked at one of them the way he looked at me just a few minutes ago.
Glassy-eyed, lost forever, barely able to hold it in his pants.
I swallow my nerves and try to get my butterflies under control. I close the album and go find my purse in the kitchen, desperate to go somewhere, anywhere, else. Because knowing that he’s one floor above me, knowing that he hasn’t showered yet, knowing that he’s in his room, where he and I were just…