Chapter 13
The bell over the door had barely stopped ringing before Billy spoke.
"Is she really our aunt?"
"She is." Samson picked the crate back up, mostly for something to do with his hands. "Your mother's sister."
"She doesn't seem like Mama," Meg said. It wasn't quite a question, but it demanded an answer all the same.
"No," Samson admitted. "They were different, your mother and Ella.
Livvy was the steady one, even though she was younger.
Ella always had a restlessness in her, wanted things quicker than they usually came, and got frustrated when the world didn't hurry to keep up.
" He set the crate on the counter, giving himself a moment to choose the next part carefully.
"They loved each other. Don't mistake me on that.
But they argued plenty too, mostly over money. "
"Is that why she never visited?" Meg asked.
“She did. When you were little. And again for the funeral.”
“Yes, I remember, now that I’ve seen her again. But she never came back to visit us. Was it because they argued?”
"Partly. Distance was part of it too. But yes. That and the money she wrote me for. Although that was after your mother passed.”
Billy frowned, working something through. "She said she came 'cause she couldn't sit in Colorado knowing about us."
"She said that," Samson agreed, and left it there, unwilling to call his own sister-in-law a liar in front of her niece and nephew, even though something in him doubted the sentence the moment she'd said it.
"You don't believe her," Meg said. It wasn't a question either.
Samson looked at his daughter, who missed very little, and decided honesty served her better than comfort. "I don't know what to believe yet. Might be she's telling it true. She’s older than she was back when I knew her, could be she’s changed."
"Is she gonna get in the way?" Billy asked. "Of Maria, and everything?"
"No," Samson said, with more certainty than he entirely felt, because it was the answer his children needed from him just then.
"Whatever Ella's here for, it doesn't change what I mean to build with Maria, or what I mean to build with the two of you.
Nobody's getting in the way of that. I won't let them. "
Meg studied him a moment longer, the way she did when deciding whether to trust a thing fully or only halfway.
"Okay," she said finally, and went back to her counting, though Samson noticed she counted the same row twice before she got it right.