Free The Ones We Trust by Kimberly Belle Page B

who lives here.
    Mom greets me as if she hasn’t seen me in months, as if I didn’t just meet her for coffee this past Thursday morning.
    “Abigail!” she says, pushing a kiss on my cheek and strangling me in a hug. “How
are
you, dear?”
    Margaret Wolff is the storybook version of a mother. The kind of mom who alphabetizes recipe cards and embroiders Christmas stockings and can whip up hot, hearty meals on a moment’s notice. While my father climbed the army’s ranks, collecting pins and adding stars to his sleeves, she stayed at home with me and Mike, packing our lunches and drilling us for spelling bees. Whenever I picture her, she always looks as she does now, in simple makeup, sensible shoes and a cheerful, frilly apron.
    She releases me, and I dole out hugs to the rest of the family. My brother, Mike, hovering at the edge of the terrace with a Heineken and his orthodontist’s smile, toothy and white. His wife, Betsy, stretched out in an Adirondack chair nearby. Their son, Tommie, dressed in a diaper and onesie and waving an empty bubble container in a fist. Chris’s wife, Susan, my godmother, who gives Mom a run for her money when it comes to enthusiastic hellos.
    By the time I’ve made my rounds, Dad and Uncle Chris are coming out the terrace door, and neither of them look particularly happy. Their knowing gazes land on me, lighting me up inside like a bonfire...or maybe that’s my own guilt at getting caught red-handed, eavesdropping on their conversation.
    Uncle Chris breaks away from my father and comes across the terrace with a wide grin. “How’s my girl?” He tucks me under an arm and drops a kiss on my temple. “Isn’t it time for another one of our monthly lunches?”
    “Way past. But you canceled the last two times.”
    “Sorry, sugar. But things have been a little hectic, as I’m sure you know, with the Armstrong case.”
    All around us, everyone has gone back to their conversations. Mom and Aunt Susan are exchanging recipes, Mike and Betsy are bickering about whose turn it is to change the baby’s diaper, Rose is sweet-talking Tommie into a bite of his cookie. Only my father is silent. His gaze is pinned to mine as if I might be concealing an IED. It’s more than just anger at the eavesdropping. It’s as if he’s searching for something in my answer.
    I keep it as innocuous as possible. “I’ll bet,” I say, returning my gaze to Uncle Chris, and that’s that.
    The party progresses the way most four-year-olds’ birthday parties do, with half-eaten hamburgers and puddles of spilled milk and more cake than any person should ever eat in one sitting. Dad barely says a word. Even worse, he spends most of every minute pumping a muscle in his jaw and glaring across the table at the man he always claimed was the brother he never had. Yet I can’t find even an ounce of affection between them now, only animosity. Whatever I walked into in that hallway is much bigger than the few sentences I overheard. There’s an electricity that crackles the air between them, and it soldiers every hair on my arms to attention.
    Finally, when Tommie’s sugar high crashes into a sticky, sweaty meltdown, Mom takes him inside for a nap, and Rose and I escape with her tea set and a pitcher of lemonade to the castle playhouse at the back of the yard, nestled at the base of a big oak tree.
    “I have a secret,” Rose tells me in an ironic twist. Another secret, this time from the four-year-old. Apparently, folks in this family learn early. “I’m asking Santa for a dog.”
    Rose and I are seated cross-legged on the grass, the tea set spread out between us. Outside the plastic castle, the early-October sun is still beating down, but thanks to the playhouse’s position in the shade and a cross breeze blowing through the half-shuttered windows, inside the air holds the cool nip of fall.
    I laugh and hand her a miniature teacup, delicately balanced on a miniature saucer. “You already have a dog.”
    “I want