“It was after a cartoon character.”
“I was six,” Christopher protested.
“You were seven, and you made Mom put 'Turbo' on your birthday cake.”
“That was one time.”
“It was two times. Tell her, Mom.”
Maggie smiled despite herself. “It may have been two times.”
“Turbo,” Becca repeated, looking at her husband with new appreciation. “Turbo Wheeler. I'm going to remember this forever.”
“Please don't.”
“Too late.”
They worked through the afternoon, the piles gradually taking shape: keep, donate, trash. Every box seemed to contain another memory, another story, another piece of the past that had to be examined and categorized and either preserved or released.
Michael found his old baseball cards, the collection he had spent years building and then abandoned when he discovered girls. Sarah took her diary from Lauren and read through several pages that were full of melodramatic entries about boys andfriends and the general injustice of being fifteen. Lauren found the dress she had worn to prom, still wrapped in plastic, impossibly small and impossibly dated.
“I can't believe I thought that was fashionable,” she said, holding it up.
“It was fashionable,” Sarah said, “at the time.”
“The shoulder pads alone could qualify for their own zip code.”
“Fashion was different then. We didn't know any better.”
“I knew better. I just didn't care.”
And through it all, Beth and Emily watched from the phone, asking questions, laughing at stories, filling in details when someone's memory failed. Emily seemed particularly fascinated by the family dynamics, the way the siblings fell into familiar patterns, teasing and defending and competing and supporting, sometimes all in the same breath.
“Is it always like this?” she asked during a quiet moment, when most of the others had gone downstairs for more coffee.
Maggie picked up the phone and looked at her. “Like what?”
“The talking over each other. The stories. The way you all seem to be having three conversations at once.”
“Yes. It's always like this. Is it overwhelming?”
Emily considered the question. “A little. But also...nice. My mother and I don't talk like this. We're very careful with each other. Very quiet. This is different.”
“Different good or different bad?”
“Different good, I think. Loud, but good.”
Maggie smiled. “That's the Wheeler family in a nutshell. Loud, but good.”
Grandma Sarah's voice came from below. “Maggie! There's a box down here labeled 'Daniel's study.' What do you want me to do with it?”
Maggie's stomach tightened. Daniel's study. She had forgotten about that box, or maybe she had deliberately not thought aboutit, shoving it to the back of her mind along with all the other things she wasn't ready to deal with.
“Leave it for now,” she called back. “We'll deal with that later.”
“When later?”
“Later, later. Just leave it.”
