in high school. You and I were in second grade. I remember seeing her and my mom out in the garden, and sometimes working in the kitchen. I think Mom taught her to bake bread.”
Nate didn’t respond but stood looking down at the photo he’d placed in the box.
“Is something wrong, Nate?”
“No. No. It’s ancient history now.”
Lisa called to him from the kitchen and he left Gemma standing where she was, gazing at the family pictures and thinking that even ancient history never really disappeared.
* * *
NATE STOOD BY the picture window in the living room and watched as Gemma and Lisa headed toward Lisa’s sporty little car. As they climbed in, Lisa said something that had Gemma throwing back her head and laughing as she tugged open the door and dropped into the seat. He tucked his hands into his back pockets and let his shoulders relax as he watched the curve of her neck and the way her ponytail bounced.
Gemma was everything this house wasn’t—warm, inviting, happy. Somehow, having her here, if even for a short time, had made the place even more depressing.
As they drove away, he turned back to the living room, his gaze going to the wall of family pictures—although, in his mind, family hardly described the people who had lived in this house, especially after Mandy’s death. He and his parents had been like three separate planets, each in their own orbit, never touching, rarely interacting. The Smiths had been the exact opposite of the Whitmires, whom he had often seen together in town—a tight, happy little unit of three. He remembered watching them with longing, wanting what they had, knowing he would never have it.
Mandy must have wanted the same thing. He hadn’t known she was close to the Whitmires. It ate at his gut to know she’d had a whole life, areas of interest he hadn’t known about, but he’d only been a kid, so how could he have known? He wondered if his parents knew. Maybe, judging by the frequent negative comments his mother had made about the “hippie crazies.”
Nate shook his head, pulling himself back from the past, where he’d been too often since returning home. Whatever happened now, it was up to him to create it. He had a huge job before him and it would be helped along by selling this mausoleum. Who knew? Maybe it would be purchased by a happy family with parents who didn’t mind how much noise a kid made running up the stairs, or building some crazy construction in the backyard.
Cheered by the thought, he turned toward the staircase and the last of the stored items he needed to sort through. There were a few sealed boxes in his mother’s closet that he would have to look at someday. They probably contained nothing more than old business papers, but maybe there was some family history that might actually spark a sense of family in him. He snorted aloud, marveling at his need to be proud of people he’d made a point of not obsessing over.
He would finish this task, have the place cleaned and painted, then sell it and move on with his life.
* * *
“I DON’T KNOW why I let you talk me into this,” Gemma groused as Carly Joslin took another bump in the road at warp speed. Her truck was headed back to Reston and the organizational meeting for the reopening of the hospital.
“I’m wondering the same thing,” Lisa added, looking from one best friend to the other.
The three of them were crowded into the front seat of Carly’s truck, as they’d been so many times before.
“Oh, come on,” Carly answered, taking her eyes off the road to tilt her head and grin at Gemma, who was hanging on to the door handle for all she was worth. “It’s like old times—taking my dad’s truck, although now it’s my truck, driving to Toncaville for lunch—”
“Dragging you out of antique and junk shops,” Lisa broke in.
“Arriving back late, getting in trouble,” Gemma added.
“Only we won’t be getting in trouble this time. We’re no longer crazy teenage girls...”
“We’re crazy thirty-two-year-old women, and at least two of us should know better than to go anywhere with you on the day the county is doing brush and bulky-trash pickup,” Lisa said.
Gemma glanced over her shoulder at the “treasures” Carly had already collected along the highway and placed in the truck bed. Twice a year, May and November, the county sent big dump trucks around to collect yard clippings to be ground into mulch, and items too large to fit into trash bins. People put out a wide assortment of throwaway items, which Carly would gleefully collect and repurpose—or “upcycle,” as she called it. She hauled it all home, stored it in the barn and garage and worked her way through it until the next brush and bulky pickup. To her it was like getting two extra Christmases each year.
Lisa glanced back, too, and Carly met their skeptical looks with an unrepentant grin.
“What are you going to do with an old bicycle frame, minus tires and handlebars?” Lisa asked.
“Are you kidding? It’s beautiful. I’ll paint it—maybe fire-engine red—and spruce it up. Imagine how cute it’s going to look in someone’s front yard with live flowers in the basket...”
“Conveniently placed for the next brush and bulky pickup,” Gemma said drily.
“It’ll be a work of art.”
“Yes,” Gemma said with a sigh. “When you’re finished with it, it probably will be. But some of that other stuff...the washing machine, for example.”
“That wringer-type washing machine is in pretty good shape considering it probably saw its heyday when Herbert Hoover was president.”
“But what on earth are you going to do with it?”
Carly gave her a smug look. “Remove the rust, oil all the parts, polish it up. Believe it or not, there’s a whole society—mostly men—who collect washing machines. After I fix it up, I’ll sell it to one of them.”
Lisa stared at her. “Men who collect washing machines? Someday you’re going to be struck by lightning for the fibs you make up.”
“It’s true! They’ve got hundreds of members—all around the world.”
“That’s crazy,” Gemma said.
“Yup, but profitable, and besides, I’m a little crazy,” Carly answered. “I’m surprised you still let me take the lead on these things.”
“You’re the one with the truck,” Gemma reminded her sweetly. “And I needed a new lawn mower, which, now that I think of it, could have fit in the back of my Land Rover.”
“But we wouldn’t have been able to collect nearly as much useful stuff—”
“Good!” her friends said in unison.
“And I could have found you an old lawn mower, fixed it up and—”
“No.”
“Well, in any case, you don’t have to do your own mowing. You could hire someone to... What’s that?” Carly slammed on the brakes at the same time she whipped her head around so fast,
