Page 48 of January

“Did it what?”

“Have a chance? She’s right: you don’t live here. She does. You’re just supposed to be here to figure out this estate thing, and then you go home. She loves New Orleans. How would that even work? A couple of dates while you’re here, and then we go home, and you guys keep in touch? Do you date long-distance? How long until it’s too hard and it ends or until she asks you to move here?”

“Jolie, you’re the one who told me to go for it.”

“I was hungover,” Jolie replied. “And besides, you’ve never listened to me before. I didn’t think you’d start now.”

“Are you kidding me?” Kyle said, chuckling. “I asked her out because of you. I was embarrassed, and now it’s awkward.”

“Kyle, it’s no big deal. People ask people out and get turned down all the time. Idostand by my idea of you asking her out. At least, now you know, and you can decide whatyou want to do: be friends with her while you’re here, or just drop it and move on,” Jolie said. “Hey, this is weird.”

“What?” she asked as her sister’s tone had changed, and she’d turned to look down at the box. “Did you find something?”

“Yes, a box of journals.”

“A box of–” Kyle stopped when she looked over and spotted book after book after book.

And Jolie was right: they all looked like journals. Some of them were larger than the others. Some were small and hardback. Others were paperback. A few looked the same as if they’d been bought together in some type of bundle. All of them looked older than the one she’d found when she’d first stopped by the house.

“That’s a lot of writing,” Jolie noted.

“And a lot of reading,” Kyle replied. “It feels weird.”

“Going through her stuff?”

“Reading her journals to learn about a woman we never met,” she replied. “The one I found wasn’t a big deal. It was mostly just her writing down what she did every day. Breakfast, TV, visit with the neighbor, more TV, gardening, more TV, and dinner. That kind of a thing. I doubt all of these are the same, though.”

“God, what if in these, she talks about sex with Grandpa or even with someone else after he died?”

Kyle laughed and said, “I hope not. If she starts talking about sex, I’m skipping, like, ten pages.”

“Grandma had sex withmen, Ky. You’d only need to skip, like, half a page.”

Kyle laughed hard at Jolie’s joke and reached down into the box to pull out one of the journals.

“Just help me see if there’s some kind of chronology here,” she replied.

They sat on the floor of the bedroom, pulling out book after book.

“So, I was thinking,” Jolie began.

“What about?”

“Well, going home,” her sister replied. “I’ve partied and had fun, and I’ve seen the city, so I’m kind of ready to go, Ky.”

“Home? Already? We’re just now starting to figure things out.”

“We’ve made the piles of stuff to donate, keep, and throw out here, and I want to keep helping, but… I don’t know. Every time I’m here, it sort of feels like you’d rather just do this alone.”

“What? Does it?”

“You want to learn more about her. I really don’t. I’m glad she left us stuff, but I think I’m still a little upset about the fact that there were nights we didn’t have dinner and went to bed hungry in a trailer, and she had all of this right here and didn’t even try to help Mom. What must have happened between them that she wouldn’t even send us something?”

“Maybe these journals will tell us,” she suggested.

“Maybe. But I don’t know that I really want to hear the excuses. I don’t want to ditch you, Kyle, but you really want to do this, and I just don’t.”

“What about the houses and the money?”

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