Page 115 of Family Bonds- Kelsey & Van

“Are you more accepting of things?”

“I’m getting there,” he said. He waited a second and finally said, “I’m supposed to ask you for a key.”

Kyle smiled. “You’ve got to be giving my daughter fits with your patience.”

“Something like that,” he said.

“I want to say it slows her down some. She’s always been in a race to get places and do things.”

“She has?” he asked. This was all news to him.

“I think that is why she swam so well. She was good. She wanted to get there first. Karen always joked that she pushed Duke out of the way so she could be born first too.”

He smiled at that thought. “If it could have been done she would have done it.”

Kyle got up and moved to the safe again, then came back and placed a keychain in front of him.

“It’s a storage unit on the island. It’s full of things from your grandfather’s past. I believe some items will have little notes on them. I haven’t been in it. It wasn’t for me to look. But in the past year or so, Barry spent a lot of time focusing on getting things ready for you.”

“He never thought to reach out to me to just talk?” he asked.

It actually saddened him to know this. That maybe he would have been so closed-minded that he wouldn’t hear the guy out.

“He didn’t know how you felt about things. I think he hoped that Lauren would have talked about him to you and maybe you’d seek him out. Since you didn’t, he was more worried that you felt the same way Adam did.”

“No,” he said.

“Your father and Barry didn’t like each other. Your father kept your mother from Barry. Yes, your mother could have left and she didn’t. I know Barry felt that deep down and it killed him that maybe Lauren chose Adam over him. There was a time Barry was willing to let Adam into his life. When things were turning around here.”

“My father would have only wanted the money,” he said.

“And Barry realized that. He battled back and forth over the money being worth having a relationship with Lauren again. One of the regrets your grandfather had was he made the wrong choice. Until the bitter end, I think he thought your mother would choose him over your father.”

He felt his eyes start to burn. “They shared that trait. I think my mother thought she could beat her cancer and waited until it was too late for her to call her father. She put her trust in the wrong person to do it. He didn’t do it. It appears to me my mother and grandfather were both too stubborn for their own good.”

He wouldn’t make that same mistake.

He needed to know why his father wouldn’t do the one thing his mother asked.

But he’d have to talk to his father for that to happen.

Just another thing he’d have to sit back on and figure it out.

“There are some questions you’re not going to get the answers to. I wish I could help, but I can’t.”

“It seems I’m getting more than I bargained for.”

He almost wished he had known of Barry before. He’d like to think he would have wanted to meet him.

“I think you can handle it,” Kyle said.

Van nodded and left, walked out to his truck with the key in his hand. He knew where the storage locker was.

He wanted to drive there and then told himself he couldn’t go alone.

That he finally reached a point in his life where he wasn’t by himself anymore and didn’t want to be.

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