Page 68 of Mess With Me
A weight pressed on Ethan’s chest, the tension unbearable. He stepped around Zach and into the house, barely seeing it. Regret hammered him. She had no family. He and Zach were both orphans. Was that why she loved them? Because they were the same? Alone.
He looked around at the same furniture from when he’d lived there—beige sofa, brown high-back chair, simple wooden coffee table and matching end tables. A tall standing lamp next to the chair for reading. No decorations, no framed pictures. Austere, neat, no sentimentality. Just like Peggy.
“It never changed,” Zach murmured, joining him in the center of the room.
“I always had this weird sense of déjà vu when I visited. Like any minute you were going to walk out of the kitchen nine years old again.”
“Yeah.”
They took a tour of the place. It was a modest space. He and Zach had probably stayed the longest. There were always two or three more kids rotating through, a lot of siblings that stuck close together. Most of them went back to their parents or other family.
Zach went into their old room and sat on the twin bed that used to be his.
Ethan remained standing, his mind a jumble of old memories. “If she loved us so much, why didn’t she adopt us?”
Zach shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe she tried, but there was some bias against her because she was single. They didn’t do many single-parent adoptions back then. Maybe she needed the money the foster care system sent for us.” He lifted his palms. “Does it really matter now?”
It shouldn’t, but it did. He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned away. It would’ve made a huge difference to him to know he was loved, to know he was good enough to be adopted. Zach already had that. He remembered his mom loved him before she was killed. Ethan had no memories to fall back on.
He headed over to the hallway and peeked into the other small bedroom. Bunk beds and a twin bed. Wood dresser and nightstand. Neat and empty. Then he went to Peggy’s room. He’d never spent any time in here, just peeked in once in a while as a kid. It was just as plain as the rest of the house. A queen-size bed with an oak headboard and a light blue comforter. The long dresser and two nightstands were matching oak. There was only one bathroom in the house, out in the hallway. Geez, what had that been like for her to share a bathroom with two teenaged boys and a parade of other kids? He’d never thought about it before.
He opened a nightstand drawer and found a small spiral notebook and pen. He closed the drawer again and gingerly sat on the side of the bed. It smelled like her in here, clean like fresh soap and lemon Pledge.
Zach came in and looked around.
“There’s a notebook in the nightstand,” Ethan said.
Zach pulled it out and opened it, showing Ethan with a small smile. “Grocery lists and menus. She probably used these when she was still fostering.”
Ethan took a look, recognizing one of the meals he’d had, meatloaf and homemade mac ’n cheese.
Zach looked through a small closet with a rack of housedresses and a few nicer dresses she’d worn to church. Shoes lined up at the bottom, sweaters neatly folded on the top shelf. Ethan stood and paced the room.
Zach started poking through the dresser drawers. He stopped at the bottom drawer and pulled out a large envelope. He carefully pulled the contents out and laid them on top of the dresser. “Eth.”
“I feel weird looking at her stuff.”
“It’s us.”
The weight on his chest made it hard to breathe. Zach was spreading out some pictures. How could he not have known he was special to her? He made his way over to Zach and stared in shock. Individual wallet-size school pictures of him and Zach, every grade, along with pictures of each of them on their birthday, every year from nine to eighteen, and then Ethan and Zach together at their high school graduation in cap and gown, grinning at the camera. Zach was valedictorian with a ton of honors. Ethan was not.
The kid pictures of him and Zach were a study in contrasts. There was Zach, staring back at the camera with solid confidence, knowing he was smart because he got straight As, knowing he was loved because he remembered his mom. And then Ethan, the lost little boy, then angry, then teenaged sneering.
“Her husband,” Zach said, setting more pictures out. There was a man in a Marine uniform and their wedding pictures. Peggy looked completely different as a bride. Her hair was dark brown and past her shoulders; she had round cheeks like she still had some baby fat. She’d always looked thin when he’d known her, and her hair had been short and gray. He looked on the back for the year and showed Zach.
“Child bride,” Zach commented. “Eighteen.”
“You think she was pregnant?”
“People got married younger back then. Maybe her husband was stationed overseas and it was easier to get married.”
There were a lot of pictures of her son. He flipped to the back of one, where her neat print said: Michael, one year, five months. He’d been born a couple of years after the wedding. The pictures stopped abruptly at age nine.
“That’s when he died,” Ethan said. And he’d been close to that age when he arrived here.
“Yeah. She told me about it once. He was riding his bike in the early morning and a drunk driver hit him. It was a teenager on an all-night bender.”
He swore under his breath. “I didn’t know all that.”
