Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 100713 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100713 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
I turned the pages as Maddie’s fingers worked on my sore muscles. It was soothing and painful at the same time.
“That was my first dog, Cobb,” my dad said, pointing a thick, knobby finger at a photo of himself around age eight with a German Shepherd. “All my dogs were named for baseball players.”
The next page had lots of baseball photos of my dad, and he pointed to each uniform and told us which team he played for that year and sometimes included a highlight from that season.
As I turned the pages, the pictures went from black and white to faded color—birthdays and holidays and baseball games and summer afternoons on the farm. Some of them I’d never seen before, but when I asked about the people in them, my dad could tell me just about everyone’s name and something about the occasion when the photo was taken. I tried to commit some of the details to memory, so that I’d be able to name the family members and tell the stories one day—although I wasn’t sure who’d want to hear them. I just knew I didn’t want them to be lost to time. Suddenly I was glad we were doing this now, before my father’s memory failed him completely.
Then I turned another page, and there she was.
“Oh, there’s Cynthia Mae,” my dad said, as if he’d misplaced his wife the other day.
He tapped the photograph of a pretty woman with a scarf tied over her auburn curls, a baby in her arms. She sat on a couch, my father beside her, his arm around her shoulders. The smile on his face was one of love and pride. In his eyes was nothing but joy. “She’s holding Amy in that picture. We’d just brought her home from the hospital.”
“That’s your mom, Beckett?” Maddie asked softly, leaning closer to the album, so close I could smell her perfume.
But my throat was so tight, I couldn’t answer right away. And I couldn’t take my eyes off my father’s image. It was like looking in a mirror—the same eyes, the same coloring, the same wide shoulders and muscular arms. Even his hands looked like mine. The wide palms, which I knew must have been thick with calluses. The visible veins. The long fingers.
He must have thought he had everything good in front of him. He must have looked at his wife and baby daughter and felt like there was nothing he wouldn’t do for them. He must have thought they were only at the beginning of what they’d build—a family, a home, a life together.
Even she looked happy to be in that moment, a brand new baby in her arms, a husband at her side. How had things gone so wrong?
I cleared my throat. “Yes.”
“She’s beautiful,” Maddie said. “She looks like Mallory.”
I turned the page. There were more pictures of my mother with my sisters as toddlers, and one of her holding an infant I assumed was me. But the light had gone out of her eyes. The smile was gone from her face. Had she already decided to leave? Was that the last time she’d held me? Had she known it then? How could you bring yourself to walk away from someone you loved the way a mother was supposed to love her child? Had she even said goodbye?
My dad said nothing else about her, and I was glad.
The album’s next few pages had goofy pictures of my sisters dressed in fluorescent leg warmers and roller-skates, their hair teased and their eyeliner heavy. Maddie laughed at snapshots of me as a skinny, gap-toothed kid in baseball pants that were too short for me, and gasped when she saw a photo from what I guessed was eighth grade of me, Griffin, Cole, and Moretti sitting on a tractor out back.
“Oh, look at you guys,” she said, almost like she was sad about it. “Just babies.”
There were more baseball pictures, and some newspaper clippings too, from my high school years. “I didn’t even realize you saved all this, Dad.”
“Of course I did,” he said. “You’ll want to show your own kids someday.”
I swallowed hard and turned the page, and there was the photo of my three best friends and me after graduation, the copy of which I’d put in the time capsule.
Maddie sighed. “So handsome.”
“So young,” I said, thinking about everything that had happened since then.
“I always felt like I had four sons,” said my dad, pointing at them. “They were always running around here. And you.” Suddenly he looked back at Maddie and smiled. “You were always at the kitchen table.”
She laughed. “I was here a lot, wasn’t I? But you know what? I loved it over here. It was always so homey and comfortable. My house was always so quiet and empty by comparison.”