I felt sick to my stomach, like someone had tied a bunch of worms together in one big knot and forced me to swallow it. I blinked hard to counteract the stinging. My lungs heaved. Swimming just underneath the surface of my hurt was fury. I couldn’t tell if I was angrier at her or at myself. Yes, she was being incredibly bitchy right now, but why was I surprised? Because, without me knowing it, I had come to think of her as family. She was my old lady, my grouchy tenant who occasionally did small and annoying things to prove she cared. She’d started to grow on me. I thought maybe, just maybe, I’d started to grow on her too.
But I’d been wrong. She was just like Hunter. Just like the teachers from my old school. Just like everyone else who looked at me and only saw a nuisance.
Turning her back on me, she muttered, “Now, did you have any other questions?”
“No.” I stabbed at my dinner with the fork. “Enjoy your fucking outing.”
It spoke volumes when she didn’t chew me out. Whatever was bothering her must’ve been so consuming that she didn’t have the strength to care about anything else, not even my “foul” language. But I wasn’t in the mood to wonder what was on her mind.
Aunt Dinah deposited her dishes in the kitchen and walked past me without a glance. I heard her take her raincoat out from the closet. A jingle of keys traveled from the little table in the sitting room to the foyer. Then the front door opened and shut.
For the first time since I’d arrived in Seattle, I was completely alone. My devious little mind, fueled by heartache and fury, came up with so many things I could do to piss Aunt Dinah off. Like hide last night’s fish behind her sock drawer. Like open all the windows in the house and let the rain ruin her carpet. But I settled on what was perhaps the worst, most expensive thing to replace: the wine. I’d strip the plastic coverings off those couches and empty every bottle of wine my aunt owned over the exposed upholstery.
Leaving the rest of my dinner at the table, I hobbled to the stairs. I suffered through the chair lift, my heart thumping hard with suppressed emotion. I rubbed a fist against my eyes.
I wasn’t gonna cry. I didn’t mean anything to her? Fine. She didn’t mean anything to me. Nothing she said mattered. Nothing that belonged to her mattered.
I slammed my crutch tip through the wall beside my bedroom door, leaving a golf-ball-sized hole. The damn crutches slowed me down! I never hated them more than I did right then but I’d be moving even slower without them. Biting back curses, I swiped a couple of hairpins from my dresser and proceeded to return downstairs. I had to set my crutches aside in order to drag the pouf from the sitting room to the wine cellar door. Hopping on my one good leg, I dragged the pale pink footstool across the hardwood. Once it was positioned in the right place, I sat on it and got to work picking the padlock. I was rusty so it took longer than I liked, but I did eventually get in.
I expected everything to be as immaculate as it was upstairs so I was surprised to see spider webs and thick coats of dust after I flipped on the light switch. Footprints created a path down the cement steps to the wine racks against the furthermost wall. The space was the size of the sitting room if only a little bigger, not the length of the entire ground floor like I’d originally assumed. It was empty other than the wine racks, a couple of plastic bins, a space heater, and...a bed?
I limped over to the solitary twin mattress, my anger ebbing as curiosity crept in. The blankets and sheets were disturbed, as if someone had slept in it last night. But that was impossible. There was dust here too and not a single footprint around the bed. The space heater, which was aimed at the mattress, was still plugged into the outlet. As I stepped around the bed, toward the plastic bins, something crinkled under my foot. I looked down to see old black and white pictures scattered over the floor. I hadn’t noticed them earlier because they were veiled by dust. I created a cloud when I sat over the bed. Setting my crutches aside, I coughed and then waved my arms around until the air was clear again.
I bent over to collect the pictures. Wiped away the remaining dust with my fingers. And stared into the face of a teenage version of my Great Aunt Dinah.
She was tall and thin with the same pointed face but her hair was cut short. It was dark and wavy, curling away from her cheeks. She wore a striped shirt tucked into some dark pants that had wide bottoms along with a pair of God-awful sandals. My great aunt seemed to be running away from the camera in this shot, grinning over her shoulder at whoever was taking the picture. There was a dirt lot ahead of her and the blurry outlines of people milling around a fire pit. The sun must’ve been setting because the sky was bright along the horizon and steadily became darker as it expanded.
I turned the picture over, hoping to see a date stamp or something, but there wasn’t one. So I reached for another picture. Aunt Dinah was chasing two little boys in this one. They were identical twins with blonde hair and wicked grins. Their collared shirts were worn at the elbows, their corduroy pants mud-stained at the knees. It looked like they were playing in the backyard
