Free Detours by Jane Vollbrecht

for him, and about a year later, he offered me a full-time position.”
    “You write for Georgia Life ?”
    “Yup, all the fascinating stuff from peanut crops to golf courses. I am your resident expert on Georgia political races, changing demographics in the state, and why our education system stinks. And I do it all from the comfort of my computer in my office right down the hall.” She pointed toward the rear of the house. “Part-time mom, full-time writer, erstwhile lesbian-in-training.” Mary checked the clock on the DVD. “But enough about me. You need an ice pack and a pill, and then I want to hear about the VanStantvoordts.”
    Mary went to the kitchen and filled an ice bag, grabbed Ellis’s pills and a bottle of water, and then hurried back to the living room. “Okay, now it’s your turn. Spill it.” She handed Ellis the supplies.
    “For starters, I don’t think our fathers could possibly be any more different from one another. I don’t think I ever saw my father smile, let alone heard him crack a joke. He was a professor of art history at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah. I’m pretty sure the fact that I share my birth date with Paul Gauguin—June seventh—was what he liked best about me.”
    “Oh, come on. It couldn’t have been that bad.”
    “I came along in 1969. He was already fifty-two when I was born, so I don’t think my arrival was exactly good news in his life.”
    “Was your mom that old, too?”
    “No, she was forty-one, but she wasn’t in good health. I don’t remember a time when she wasn’t sick. When I think back on my childhood, all I picture is darkened rooms and hushed voices and everybody acting like something awful was about to happen.”
    “Are your parents still alive?”
    “My mom died the summer after I graduated from high school. My dad told her it was too cold for her to sit outdoors at my commencement ceremony, but she went anyway. She got pneumonia. It was pretty awful.”
    “I’m really sorry, Ellis.” Mary hugged herself as she spoke. “Losing a parent is so hard. I don’t care if it is the natural order of things. We need better users’ manuals for how to get through it. What about your dad?”
    “He died in 2002, just a month short of his eighty-fifth birthday. He lived by himself right up to the end, still in the house I grew up in down in Savannah. And I guess I should confess, I hadn’t been there since Christmas 1999.”
    “How come?”
    “I always felt like an afterthought in his life. His only passion was for paintings by Rembrandt, Jan Steen, and Vermeer. When I still lived there, we often went for days on end with nothing more than cursory greetings as we passed each other at the breakfast table. Sometimes, he took me with him when he went to museums, but I think it was to make sure I wasn’t tiring my mother rather than so he and I could have time together. He’d lose himself in the artwork, and I’d make up games in my head to pass the time.”
    “Were you an only child?”
    “No, I’ve got a brother, Nicolas, and a sister, Anika. They’re twins, thirteen years older than me. By the time I started grade school, they were grown and gone.”
    “Do you see them much?”
    Ellis shook her head. “Almost never. We don’t even write to each other. The last I knew, my brother was working for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and my sister and her husband were in Richmond, Virginia.” She eyed Mary and spoke more slowly. “Dedrick and Helen, Nicolas and Anika. Those were the real VanStandvoordts. I was just a footnote to the family history.”
    “Kids never believe they were important to their parents in the ways they wanted to be. Just ask Natalie. And as you’ve heard, the Moss tribe isn’t exactly the great American family, either. Maybe we’d better move on to another topic before we need to take a break and seek emergency psychotherapy.” Mary grinned maniacally. “Did you go to college?”
    “I