Unbreathed Memories by Marcia Talley Read Free Book Online Page A

night.”
    Sean folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t want to go.”
    “Me, neither,” Dylan agreed.
    “You are silly boys,” announced Julie. “Granddaddy has a pool table.” That seemed to make all the difference. Julie, I decided, had a future in politics.
    I left the boys arguing over which of their Star Wars action figures to pack in their bags while I wandered into my sister’s bedroom. I told myself I was searching for a hairbrush for Julie, but to be honest, I was snooping. AsI expected, the room was a mess. The clothes Georgina had worn the day before were heaped in a corner next to the dirty clothes hamper, as if someone with very poor aim had tossed them there. A dresser drawer stood open; another drawer had been hastily closed over some item of clothing, probably the corner of a T-shirt. Compulsively, I picked up the scattered clothing and laid it on the bed, then looked around the room for the missing hairbrush. I was about to give up when something caught my attention, propped up on my sister’s side of the bed between the box springs and the leg of her bedside table—a framed photograph of Georgina at the age of three. I recognized the pose. It was from a snapshot of us girls Dad took for our Christmas postcard the last year we lived in Sicily. But Georgina had cropped Ruth and me out of the picture altogether and blown herself up to a fuzzy eight-by-ten. I tried not to feel annoyed.
    I studied the picture and was struck by how much Julie now resembled her mother at that age. I stroked the smooth mahogany of the frame with my fingers. The kids had certainly been handling the picture, poor little tykes. I hadn’t seen picture glass so smudgy with fingerprints since my photograph of Paul McCartney, the love of my life in junior high school.
    I placed Georgina’s picture between a lamp and an alarm clock on her bedside table, then made a valiant stab at tidying up the rest of the room, but the clutter of soaps, cleansers, cosmetics, and vials of prescription drugs from three or four different doctors defeated me and I moved on to the less personal and more familiar territory of the family room and kitchen. While the kids took their sweet time packing, I folded up the hide-abed, reduced the scattered magazines to a single pile on the coffee table, moved the children’s breakfast dishesfrom the sink to the dishwasher, and gave the kitchen table and countertops a badly needed swipe with a damp rag. Around eleven, I got the house locked, the kids loaded into the car, and my Le Baron headed east around I-695 toward Annapolis. On car trips when we were small, my sisters and I used to dream up irreverent lyrics to “Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother’s House We Go,” until Daddy, laughing, would threaten to pull over and leave us by the side of the road. Kids haven’t changed all that much. While I drove, Sean and Dylan lounged on one side of the backseat and butchered “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” while Julie, belted in behind me with Abby, pretended to ignore her brothers and wondered aloud why we couldn’t put the top on my convertible down.
    “It’s winter,” I told her. “There’s snow on the ground.”
    “The sun’s out,” she said, reasonably.
    “It’s too cold.”
    “You could put the heater on.”
    I took my eyes off the beltway traffic for a second and looked at her in the rearview mirror. “I could, but our heads would freeze off.”
    Julie giggled. “If we didn’t have heads, we couldn’t eat. Is Gramma going to have cookies?”
    Julie must have been thinking of my mother’s famous soft, melt-in-your-mouth ginger cookies. I figured that Mom hadn’t even had time to unpack the cookie sheets, let alone bake anything on them. “I don’t know, Julie. But we could stop at the grocery store and get some pizza.”
    “Yay, pizza!” Dylan lived for pizza.
    “Pepperoni!” chimed in Sean. “No mushrooms.”
    “Abby likes mushrooms,” said