The Orphan by Robert Stallman Read Free Book Online

with metal rings and with many pictures attached to each page. She and Robert looked through the last pages in the book where there were pictures of Vaire and Anne and Walter, and some pictures of a pretty, black haired woman standing with a tall, heavy looking man in a suit. They looked bright and happy. The man had a white flower in his lapel.
    “That’s Renee and her husband, Billy, when they were married,” Aunt Cat said. “Here’s their little girl, Wilhelmina, and here they are when Mina was a year old.”
    “Is this book all about your family?” Robert wondered. There seemed to be thousands of pictures earlier in the book. He thought Martin and Aunt Cat must have hundreds of children.
    “Yes, it’s pictures that go back to the first Kodak we had in my mother’s family. See here, toward the front. That’s me in the long dress and the funny hat.” She laughed and motioned for Martin to come over. “Look at this one of Claire, Martin. I don’t recall this one. Look at her in that suit. Wouldn’t she just have a fit?” Aunt Cat and Martin both began to laugh at a faded picture of a frowning young girl in a funny black suit that covered her whole body. She was standing in ankle deep water with an out-of-focus lake behind her.
    “Is she your daughter too?” Robert asked.
    “Oh my, Little Robert,” Aunt Cat said, widening her eyes. “That’s my very own Claire, my sister, when we were just girls, oh thirty years ago and more.”
    Robert tried to think about that, but time in such quantities was a blank.
    “Do you love all your families?” he asked seriously.
    Aunt Cat caught his tone. “Yes we do, Little Robert. And we love you too, for now you are part of our family.” And she gave him a hug and kissed his cheek.
    “Is love when you’re in a family?”
    “That’s how you get a family,” Martin said, winking at Aunt Cat.
    She turned and looked at the man, smiling in a certain way again. Robert watched with a hungry look. What was it that they were doing? That invisible thing that went between them sometimes? He watched and listened, but he couldn’t understand it.
    “Do I love you?” he asked Aunt Cat.
    “Well, I think you might, sometime.”
    “Don’t I now?”
    “Robert, you are so funny. Only you can know if you love someone. We can’t know before you do.”
    He thought about that for a minute. I begin to listen from far back, for this conversation is having strange effects. Emotional waves are originating from somewhere within Robert.
    “Do I love you like this?” he asked, suddenly putting his arms around her neck and crawling into her lap.
    She caught him in her arms and hugged him.
    “Yes, Little Robert,” she said. “That’s the way.”

(3)

    The tall one named Gus carries the jug. When the others want a drink they have to ask Gus, and he keeps one finger crooked through the eye of the handle while they drink. They crunch along the right of way in the cinders, stumbling over the ends of ties now and again. I keep up with them in the weedy ditch with my head just touched by the moonlight coming across the high rails. If they look they might see my head listening to them, floating along silently in the white moonlight.
    “Yer fullashit, Tommy,” says the old man, the one who is sick inside. “You ever gonta make a buck again, it gonta be selling quarts of your blood fer antifreeze.” He coughs and spits.
    “That’s better’n you, you old fart. You ain’t got any to sell.” Tommy’s shoulders hump as if against the cold, although it is a hot night. His legs are so thin his pants seem to be walking by themselves.
    “We can make some dough picking strawberries soon,” Gus says, swinging his big head from side to side. He holds the jug up so even I can see there is only about a fourth of it left. “Pick a couple, eat a couple....” His words trail off as he takes a sip delicately from the mouth of the jug as it receiving a kiss.
    “Yah,” the old sick one jeers.