“Thank you for inviting us,” I said. “Your family is amazing.”
“They can be a bit much.”
“Better than not enough.” I loved the way they talked. Teased. Argued. “My aunt Em and uncle Henry never said more than three sentences at dinner. It must be nice, being part of a large family.”
“You have a sister.”
“Toni. She’s eighteen. A freshman at KU—that’s where I went to school. She’s having trouble adjusting without me. It’s always been the two of us before.” I made myself as comfortable as I could in the hard plastic chair. “Our mother traveled a lot.”
“For her job?”
“For her art.”
“It’s not that Iwantto be away from you, darling,” she always said before she jetted off on some new adventure. Leaving us waiting, princesses in the tower, for our mother the queen to ride to our rescue.
“She did these big installations all over the world. Larger than life.” I smiled a little, remembering her exuberant hair, her expressive face, the way she blew into a room like the wind. “Well, that was Mom.”
“Where is she now?”
“She died when I was twelve.” Her friend Leslie didn’t go into details, but I’d looked up the news accounts online.Artist Dies in Tragic Fall in Joshua Tree, Halting Installation. “Toni barely remembers her. I always felt I had to make that up to her somehow.”
Sam nodded. “It was like that for me when our da died.”
When he left Trinity to take over the shop. My heart squeezed. “At least you had your mother.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Mad about that, are you?”
“No.”Maybe. “It’s not like our mother chose to leave us.”
“Sounds like she did.”
“I mean... She didn’t choose to die. It was an accident.” Equipment malfunction, the witnesses said. No one’s fault. “It’s only... We never got to say good-bye.”
“Our dad, it was lung cancer. Plenty of time for good-bye. Didn’t change anything. He left us behind, all the same.”
“I’m sorry.”
He raised one shoulder in a shrug. “Sure, look, life goes on. ‘Some things are more precious because they don’t last long.’ ”
“Tennessee Williams again?” I guessed.
He smiled crookedly. “Oscar Wilde.”
I didn’t know what to say. He was so smart. It wasn’t fair. He deserved the chance to go to school. To graduate. To live his best life. Isn’t that what he wanted? Isn’t that what his father would have wanted for him?
“Would you like to go to a lecture with me?” I blurted. “Oscar Diggs—you know, the children’s author?—he’s coming to Trinity in a couple weeks, and his talk is open to the public.”
Sam shook his head.
“It’s free.”
“Not my thing.”
“You don’t like children’s books?”
“It’s too late for me.”
I stood. “You should stop saying that. If you tell a story often enough, it comes true. You need another story, one with a happy ending. The princess gets rescued. The witch is defeated. The orphan children find a home.” I stopped, embarrassed by my own vehemence. “Anyway, that’s what I always told Toni.”
