Dean didn’t want to go.
He insisted we take her to Disney World instead.
It was fun, if overwhelming, but I wish we’d come here.
Junie never met Uncle Tony. Not in person.
“Bunch of people thought it was interesting he left the ranch to someone most of us have never met,” Opal says.
I don’t sense judgment.
Mostly curiosity.
“He was the black sheep of my mom’s family,” I say.
Junie makes a noise that needs no interpretation.How much worse was he than Grandma if she’s in jail and he was the black sheep?
I shoot her a look, but she’s fully hiding behind a magazine now.
One with a front-page picture of Dean and his girlfriend.
Best of luck to her.
The girlfriend, I mean.
“Now how was Tony Coleman the black sheep ofanyfamily?” Charlotte demands. “He was a little ... eccentric ... but he was always lovely.”
“He was apparently pretty wild in his younger years.” I smile at some of the stories I’ve heard. Mostly low-key things like marijuana, parking lot racing, and one incident involving cherry bombs in a sewer that I’ve been sworn upon pain of death to never, ever, ever repeat. “When I wasreallylittle, I was told he had the mark of the devil on him and that he was an immoral lost soul bound for hell. But then we changed churches, he won the lottery and bought this place, my parentsgot divorced, and suddenly he was good enough to babysit me out here for a week or two every summer.”
“Mom,” Junie says. “You never told me any of that.”
“I know. I’m sorry, ba—Junie. I’ll tell you more stories now. Promise.”
“Was he wild out here?” Junie asks Opal, who’s shaking out a smock and getting me prepped for my haircut.
“He never met a soul in need he wasn’t willing to help,” she tells my daughter. “Animals. Human. Once, he adopted a cactus that fell off someone’s car as they were heading out of town.”
That sounds like Uncle Tony. I blink back the slight sting that’s basically perpetually threatened my eyes since we got here. “We should’ve come visit more.”
“You talk to him much?” Opal asks.
“He’d call every once in a while. Email more often. But he and my mom had a big fight a few years ago—”
“Mm. Yes.”
I study Opal in the mirror. “I never got a straight answer on why,” I say slowly.
“Something about a new business venture she wanted him to invest in,” Charlotte pipes up. “Your mom doesn’t steal babies and sell them on the black market, does she?”
“Oh my God,no.”
Junie slinks lower in her seat, the magazine so close to her face she can’t possibly read the words.
“Why—why would you ask that?” I ask Charlotte.
“Never saw Tony so angry,” she replies. “All he’d say wasStupid family, stupid ideas—that’s not me.”
“That’s ... all he said?”
