“I’d traveled with my grandparents since I was five.”
“Wow.” I didn’t leave Georgia until I was nineteen. “Are they still alive?”
“Yes. Are yours?”
“No,” I said. “Well, I don’t know. My parents met in a foster home. They didn’t know their parents.”
“Do you know what happened to your father?”
“Nope. William and I are too pissed off to locate him.” I sighed heavily. “I don’t even bother to keep in touch with my mother.” I knew I should have felt pain or regret or guilt for saying those words, but I didn’t. I felt more empathy for a homeless person on the streets than for my own self-loving mother.
Andrew’s eyebrows pinched in a sad arch. “Why?”
“Our mother wasn’t interested in us. To this day, she only calls us when she needs cash. Sometimes I don’t even answer. But…”—I pulled a weak smile—“I keep in touch with Mrs. Rudy, so I know mom is alive and changing jobs as quickly as her boyfriends.”
“Was she unkind?” he said, the concern clear in his voice.
I shrugged, trying not to move my extended arm. “She didn’t beat us or anything like that. She just didn’t want to be a mother. As a child, I craved her love, and any insignificant attention from her was a big deal, but as I grew older, I didn’t like her. William and I have been running a household since before we were teenagers. We had no childhood.” The old anger rose in me at how many weeks we’d spent left alone without a parent. Wearing the same dirty clothes and eating cereal for days. Kids complained about school food, but to me it was the best meal of the day. Summers were the hardest because of the two-month break. William and I lost our breakfast and lunch.
“If not for Mrs. Rudy’s help, we probably wouldn’t have survived.” I scoffed and rolled my eyes. “Okay, we would’ve survived, but we would’ve been pulled into the foster system, probably separated, and I’m not sure it would’ve been any better. We had classmates who were in foster care, and the horrors they told us haunted my nightmares. It was for the best we were left to fend for ourselves.”
Andrew placed the pencil on his lap and studied me with an unsettled expression. “Did this Mrs. Ruby have any kids? Why couldn’t she foster you both? Was she old?”
I took a deep breath, expanding my lungs to their maximum. “At the time, she was in her early fifties, but she had a criminal record, so she wasn’t aperfectfit. She’s the nicest woman I know and would have been a great mom to us. She knew telling authorities about our parents wouldn’t do any good so she helped as much as she could. She took us to a doctor when we were sick, and she taught us all the things we needed to know to make our situation work.”
“What about school?” Andrew peered curiously at me. “Didn’t they notice your mother wasn’t there ever?”
“Maybe they did; maybe they didn’t. We were honor students and never bothered anybody. William and I were both valedictorians.”
“I’m sorry you had to grow up like that.”
“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, right?” And a little bitter. I grinned to cover the old pain.
“You are strong. Look at everything you and your brother achieved in your life with nobody’s help.”
I laughed without humor. “William, yes, he achieved a lot. Me? Well, I’m not sure yet. So far, I’m a homeless and jobless owner of a building that needs thousands of dollars to become a store and my home. Money that I don’t have.” First, Dr. Garcia’s stupid call and now my mopey life story had totally dampened the mood. “When did you decide you wanted to become an archeologist?”
“When I was eight years old, I climbed inside an abandoned manor about a mile away from where we lived.” Andrew reached out to my hand, and the pads of his fingers pressed into my skin as he rotated the bracelet.
“The same place where you got the scar on your face?”
“Yes. I explored it for a while, and then I fell through the rotten floorboards and landed in a cellar. The door wouldn’t open no matter what I tried, so I was stuck there for fourteen hours.”
I sucked air between my teeth. “Ouch. Fourteen hours? Were you scared?”
“Not really. The aftershock of pain vanished—I didn’t even know how bad it was until I saw my mother’s face—and I knew someone would find me eventually. I got thirsty, and there were several cases of unopened wine bottles.”
“Oh god.” I wrinkled my nose. “Don’t tell me you drank some of it?”
“It was disgusting.” Andrew gently changed the angle of my arm. “Hold still.”
“How much did you drink?”
“Enough to put me to sleep and not hear my parents calling out my name when they came looking for me that evening when I didn’t return for supper. Eventually a sniffer dog found me. The paramedic team had to pull me out through the same hole because the wall in the basement outside the cellar had collapsed and blocked the door.”
“Did you get in trouble for trespassing and getting drunk?”
“No. I was dirty, inebriated, and blood covered my face. My parents were so happy to see me alive that they forgot to lecture me. My poor mother, I can still picture her expression.” His hands stilled, then he released a heavy sigh. “Anyway, the morning after I decided I wanted to become someone who always explores unknown places and searches for treasure, I asked my grandfather to take me on his next dig.”
