Chapter 21 #2
“I spent two summers looking for this glove.”
“Did you ever think to check the attic?”
“I was twelve. The attic was scary.”
Lauren opened a box near the window and pulled out a diary. She started to read an entry.
“Don't read those!” Sarah lunged toward her sister.
“Too late.” Mrs. Henderson is so boring I want to die. Also, I think Jason Mitchell is cute. Lauren looked up triumphantly. “Jason Mitchell. I totally forgot about Jason Mitchell.”
“I will pay you actual money to destroy those notes.”
“Not a chance. These are historical documents.”
“They're embarrassing.”
“Same thing.”
Michael opened a photo album. “Look at Chris’s baby pictures.”
“Let me see, hold it up to the phone,” Beth said.
Michael held the photo album in front of the phone’s camera, and Beth laughed. “Oh my goodness. Look at those cheeks.”
“He was a fat baby,” Sarah said. “The fattest baby.”
“I was not fat. I was robust.”
“You were so fat Mom had to buy you special diapers.”
“That's not true.”
“It's absolutely true. Mom, tell him.”
Maggie looked up from the box she was sorting through—old tax returns, definitely going in the trash pile. “You were a healthy baby, Chris. Very healthy.”
“See?” Sarah said. “Fat.”
“Healthy and fat are not the same thing.”
“In baby terms, they're exactly the same thing.”
On the phone, Beth was laughing, and even Emily had a smile on her face. “He was a fat baby,” Beth confirmed. “I remember. His thighs had rolls.”
“My thighs were magnificent.”
“Your thighs were hilarious.”
Becca appeared at the top of the stairs. “Ellie is asleep. Mind if I join you all?”
“Not at all. Come and see what a handsome baby your husband was.”
Becca sat on the floor next to Christopher.
Michael flipped through more photos, his expression shifting from amused to something softer. “Look at this one. Chris, you must be about four here. You're wearing a tiny suit.”
“That was for Grandpa's funeral,” Maggie said, the memory surfacing unexpectedly. “Daniel's father. Chris insisted on wearing a tie like the grown-ups.”
“He couldn't tie it himself,” Michael added. “So Dad tied it for him, and then Chris walked around all day making sure the tie was straight. Wouldn't let anyone touch it.”
“I remember that tie,” Christopher said quietly. “It was blue with little red stripes. Dad said it was his lucky tie and he was letting me borrow it.”
The attic went quiet for a moment. Daniel's shadow fell across so many of these memories, present in the photos, present in the stories, present in the objects they were sorting through.
He had been a father to these children long before he had been a cheater and a liar.
He had tied Christopher's tie and taught Michael to throw a baseball and walked Lauren down the aisle at her wedding.
The complicated truth of Daniel Wheeler hung in the air, unspoken but acknowledged.
“Anyway,” Lauren said briskly, breaking the silence, “Becca, you should know that Christopher also went through a phase where he only answered to the name 'Turbo.'”
Becca's eyebrows shot up. “Turbo?”
“It was after a cartoon character.”
“I was six,” Christopher protested.
“You were seven, and you made Mom put 'Turbo' on your birthday cake.”
“That was one time.”
“It was two times. Tell her, Mom.”
Maggie smiled despite herself. “It may have been two times.”
“Turbo,” Becca repeated, looking at her husband with new appreciation. “Turbo Wheeler. I'm going to remember this forever.”
“Please don't.”
“Too late.”
They worked through the afternoon, the piles gradually taking shape: keep, donate, trash. Every box seemed to contain another memory, another story, another piece of the past that had to be examined and categorized and either preserved or released.
Michael found his old baseball cards, the collection he had spent years building and then abandoned when he discovered girls.
Sarah took her diary from Lauren and read through several pages that were full of melodramatic entries about boys and friends and the general injustice of being fifteen.
Lauren found the dress she had worn to prom, still wrapped in plastic, impossibly small and impossibly dated.
“I can't believe I thought that was fashionable,” she said, holding it up.
“It was fashionable,” Sarah said, “at the time.”
“The shoulder pads alone could qualify for their own zip code.”
“Fashion was different then. We didn't know any better.”
“I knew better. I just didn't care.”
And through it all, Beth and Emily watched from the phone, asking questions, laughing at stories, filling in details when someone's memory failed.
Emily seemed particularly fascinated by the family dynamics, the way the siblings fell into familiar patterns, teasing and defending and competing and supporting, sometimes all in the same breath.
“Is it always like this?” she asked during a quiet moment, when most of the others had gone downstairs for more coffee.
Maggie picked up the phone and looked at her. “Like what?”
“The talking over each other. The stories. The way you all seem to be having three conversations at once.”
“Yes. It's always like this. Is it overwhelming?”
Emily considered the question. “A little. But also...nice. My mother and I don't talk like this. We're very careful with each other. Very quiet. This is different.”
“Different good or different bad?”
“Different good, I think. Loud, but good.”
Maggie smiled. “That's the Wheeler family in a nutshell. Loud, but good.”
Grandma Sarah's voice came from below. “Maggie! There's a box down here labeled 'Daniel's study.' What do you want me to do with it?”
Maggie's stomach tightened. Daniel's study. She had forgotten about that box, or maybe she had deliberately not thought about it, shoving it to the back of her mind along with all the other things she wasn't ready to deal with.
“Leave it for now,” she called back. “We'll deal with that later.”
“When later?”
“Later, later. Just leave it.”
There was a pause, then: “Okay. But you can't avoid it forever.”
“I'm not avoiding it. I'm prioritizing.”
“That's what avoiding looks like.”
Maggie sighed and looked back at the phone, where Beth and Emily were watching with twin expressions of concern.
“Dad's stuff,” Beth said quietly. “That's going to be hard.”
“I know.”
“Are you going to go through it?”
“I have to. Eventually. Just...not yet. Not today.”
On the screen, Emily's face was thoughtful. “What happens to the things of someone who...who wasn't who you thought they were? How do you decide what to keep?”
It was such an Emily question, direct, unflinching, getting right to the heart of what everyone else was dancing around. Maggie found she appreciated it.
“I don't know,” she admitted. “I haven't figured that out yet.
He was their father. He was a good father, in many ways, for many years.
The things in that box are probably from before, before everything fell apart.
But they're still his things. And touching them means touching all of it. The good parts and the bad parts.”
“I understand,” Emily said. “I have things from my mother's house that remind me of the times she pretended I didn't exist. I keep them anyway. Because they're part of my story, even the parts I don't like.”
Beth reached over and squeezed Emily's hand, and on the tiny phone screen, Maggie watched them with a full heart.
“Today is about the good memories. The rest can wait.”
She set the phone back on its perch and returned to the boxes, to the old report cards and baby teeth and soccer trophies, to the tangible evidence of the family she had built and the life she had lived.
Tomorrow, she would deal with the harder things.