Page 13 of Family Ties

I think my uncle is looking at buying them an apartment in the city. A late wedding gift. And a way for the rest of us to keep our sanity.

Except where Bianca would normally have some witty comeback, she shifts uncomfortably and looks at Andy. “Can we talk?”

Chapter Eight- Emma

I’ve never been a fan of flying into the Denver airport. It’s busy and chaotic, you have to take trains to get places. There’s the horse. The horse weirds me out.

My aunt lives in a smaller town about half an hour outside the Denver metro area. I’m thankful for the fact she doesn’t live in Denver. I find it to be suffocating. In some ways, I prefer New York City. At least New York City has adequate amounts of public transport to combat the excessive amounts of people. Denver is a city that has grown too fast for its own good.

My aunt meets me outside the airport. She has her arms open the second we make eye contact and I all but launch myself into her. I take less than a minute to break down. For the first time in weeks, I feel safe. Even when I called her the other night, I didn't dare cry.

“Sweetheart,” she mutters into my hair as she strokes my back. “It’s going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay.”

The ride to the house she bought after she moved out of my father's house is silent except for the hiccuping sobs that escape me. The city fades away, replaced by rolling hills and long stretches of farmland. Self-serve booths advertise farm-fresh eggs for sale and signs advertising discount beef if you buy the whole cow. It’s a world apart from my life in New York.

My aunt has a hobby farm. It isn’t her primary source of income, but she does rent out some animals for kids’ parties and hosts a petting zoo on the weekends. She also puts together a Halloween festival in the fall. Mostly she says it’s good for her stress levels to live life a little slower. She deserves this, deserves a life where she can be happy after she gave it up for so many years to raise me.

And now she’s doing it again, allowing me to impede on her space and time though she never asked to play this big of a role in my life.

Sometimes I wonder what things would be like if my mom never died. If she was still around. I doubt I’d have gone to Catholic school, my aunt told me my mom had a strong dislike of organized religion. She fought my father when he signed me up. He insisted it was the only decent place to get educated, but now I wonder if that was his intention. There were other private schools in the area, co-ed ones. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so taken by the first man who showed interest in me if I'd had more experience.

I replay the night in my head a lot, trying to dissect whether it was as real for Enzo as it was for me. It felt real. I don't have anything to compare it to as I've never had the opportunity to date before. Romance movies and books are the extent of my knowledge, and those aren't real. If Enzo is a halfway decent actor, and I’m sure being in the mafia requires some sort of acting skills, he could have easily played me.

It hurts, knowing something significant to me could mean nothing to him. I never expected to see him again after that night, I was supposed to go off to Brown after this summer, but the illusion of our night together soothed the guilt I felt towards breaking all of my father’s rules.

We pull up to my aunt’s house. It’s two stories, a little run down, but it has all the warmth you would expect from a home.

When I asked her if she wanted to have kids when I was growing up, she told me she was happy with being my aunt. This house doesn't look like the kind of place that would belong to a single, childless woman. It's too large, and I once again find myself wondering if I impeded her dreams.

After dropping my bags in the room she has left intact since my last visit to her, I head outside. The fresh air always does my head good, and there's no better place to think than with the miniature cow my aunt bought at the auction two years ago. She behaves like a very good pillow.

That's where my aunt finds me a couple of hours later.

“I don’t think I want to go to Brown,” I tell her when she approaches me.

I've been thinking about it. My father wanted me to go to Brown and pushed me to go to Brown, full of tales about the school he was never able to attend because it was too expensive. While he didn't speak much about his childhood, I know his parents were poor. Most of the people he grew up with never went to college, but the state gave him enough scholarships to get through his undergrad. Ever since I was old enough to talk, he's been training me to say that I'd attend Brown. Most five-year-olds don't draw a brown building for career day at school.

My aunt glances at me. “You’ve taken a year off, it should give you some time to think about what you want to do. A lot of women have kids and go to school at the same time.”

“Yes, but I don’t think I want to go to Brown. I don’t think I want to be a lawyer,” I admit to her. "After the past couple of weeks, I've been working on figuring out who I am and who I was to please my father. He wanted me to go to Brown, I don't think it was ever my goal."

My aunt hesitates for a second. For most of my life, I’ve planned to follow in my father’s footsteps. Yet I don't know what he does. He never told me who he works for. Everything that I have been chasing has been nothing but a lie. "So what was your goal then?" she asks me.

"I wanted to make him proud of me."

Well, screw his expectations of me. He certainly hasn’t lived up to my expectations of him. And I have someone coming who is far more important than him. My hand migrates down to my stomach.

“Do you think I could talk to a therapist while I’m here? I think I have a lot to work through,” I ask her, realizing that she isn't equipped to deal with my emotional revelations.

My aunt gives me one of her soft smiles and she nods her head. “Of course you can, dear. We’ll get you settled, and the midwife is coming to see you tomorrow. We’ll see if she has any recommendations on therapists.”

Instead of going to the room she set up for me at her house, I bring my bags into the living room and go out to her animals. Right now, she has some chickens, goats, and a miniature cow. The miniature cow spots me and jots right up to me, pressing her head into me to ask for attention.

My aunt gives me space, but only for a little while. When she comes to find me, I'm lying with my head on the cow.

“I’ll help you find a therapist, but you don’t need to wait until you’re in therapy. We can talk about it now,” she tells me, running her fingers through my hair. I nod my head, knowing I can talk with her about anything.

“I will. Eventually. Not today.”

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