Unbreathed Memories by Marcia Talley Read Free Book Online Page B

Julie. “Don’t you, Abby?”
    I felt as if I’d stepped into a time capsule and been whisked back forty years. As I drove south on I-97 listening to the happy patter and good-natured squabbling of the children, I recalled wondrous cross-country trips as the U.S. Navy moved us from one duty station to another. Sometimes Daddy would hitch up a trailer to our big Chrysler and drag it behind. We’d camp in national parks along the way—Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, Yosemite. I smashed my finger in a door at the Tetons and bled all over my new plaid shirt. Mother washed it out in a tub of cold water, using an old-fashioned corrugated washboard. Funny the things you remember.
    Sometimes we’d pull off the road where a flashing neon sign announced “Vacancy” and “Free TV,” and, if we were really lucky, “Heated Pool.” We loved staying in inexpensive motels where my sisters and I would get a room of our own. With our parents locked safely behind the connecting door, we’d watch TV late into the night, falling asleep while the black-and-white images still flickered on the cheap knotty-pine paneling.
    “The Doorknob to Hell,” a small voice intoned from the backseat. We were heading east on Rowe Boulevard, just approaching the Naval Academy stadium where a water tower shaped like a golf ball on a tee towered over the parking lot.
    I glanced into the rearview mirror and tried to catch Dylan’s eye. “Who told you that, Dylan?”
    “Nobody. Looks like a doorknob is all.”
    “Yeah,” Sean agreed. “There was this giant …” and the twins launched into an improbable story involving dinosaurs, devils, and underground caverns, interrupting each other to heap one extravagant detail upon another until Julie clamped both hands over her ears and even I screamed for mercy. But in the left-turn lane atTaylor Avenue, waiting for the light, I looked back over my shoulder toward the stadium. The kid was right. Darn thing did look like a giant doorknob.
    Ignoring our pleas, Sean reached the climax of his story and began making woo woo noises and waggling his fingers at his sister.
    “Make him stop, Aunt Hannah! He’s scaring Abby!”
    The light turned green just then, of course, so I couldn’t deal with Sean until we had pulled into the parking lot at Graul’s Market.
    I unbuckled my seat belt and swiveled around. “If you can’t behave yourself, Sean Patrick, I’ll have to leave you in the car while the rest of us go shopping.”
    I wouldn’t have, of course, but Sean didn’t know that. He hung his head until his dimpled chin touched his chest, tucked his hands snugly between his knees, then looked up at me through white-blond lashes. “Can I pick out the pizza?”
    “You can each pick out a pizza.” Auntie Hannah wasn’t usually so generous. I just wasn’t in the mood for any hassles. Exhausted with worry and racked by guilt, I could focus only on getting to my parents’, anxious to find out if my passion for truth had ruined my sister’s life.
    A few minutes later, I paraded into the supermarket, three perfectly behaved children in tow. It was too good to last. Dylan wanted to take the shopping cart and tear through the aisles like Mario Andretti, but I nipped his racing career in the bud by putting him in charge of my purse, a large bookbaglike satchel that contained everything I own. He hung it around his neck like a feedbag. At the checkout, he reached in and solemnly extracted a twenty-dollar bill from my coin purse and handed it to the cashier. Sean, meanwhile, correctly pegging me as a softie, had selected two candy bars and tried to slipthem into the shopping cart when he thought I wasn’t looking. Julie, ignoring us all, danced Abby up and down the tabloid magazine racks. Abby laid a noisy kiss on Leonardo DiCaprio, then moved on to smooch with Bill Clinton. Cheeky little rabbit. I had forgotten how it was, shopping with kids.
    Back in the car, the children were strangely subdued, and I