Free Things Worth Remembering by Jackina Stark Page A

loved them. They did their best to teach my brothers and me financial responsibility. An allowance did not come without strings attached: They taught us to tithe ten percent, to consider giving an offering on top of that, and to save at least twenty percent, and then we could decide what we should do with the rest. I was unanimously voted the best saver of us all. The story goes that I still have all the money I put in my piggy bank before I started school.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “That’s the story. But no one can find the bank to prove it. My theory is they made it up at some point and now believe it to be true.”
    “An embellishment gone awry,” I say.
    “Exactly.”
    “Well, I’m sure your brothers will be delightful escorts for Maisey’s friends.” I get up and bring the carton of orange juice back to the table. “A big family sounds like fun,” I say.
    “It is.”
    “It also sounds boisterous.”
    “That’s for sure. And if five boys weren’t enough, we always had a dog or two—house dogs—and a cat that died just a few months ago at the impressive age of twenty-one.”
    I have to laugh. “I have absolutely no frame of reference for so much activity. Like Maisey, I was an only child, and to make matters worse, I lived in a condo, my only companion a goldfish incapable of making a ruckus.”
    “Did you like being an only child?”
    “It was okay.”
    He looks at me as though I should have more to say.
    “There really isn’t much to tell, but I’ll try to come up with a detail or two for you one of these days.”
    “I’ll hold you to that,” he says, jumping up, rinsing his bowl, and heading out in search of a weed eater.
    I put our bowls into the dishwasher, get the ground beef out of the refrigerator, and begin to make hamburger patties for the cookout, thinking about how differently Marcus and Maisey grew up.
    She, like I, grew up as an only child, though Jackie practically lived here during middle school and high school. Like Marcus, Jackie was one of five children, and her mother never seemed to mind loaning her out, at least to us. I did not want Maisey to be an only child. Oh, how I had wanted another! But my doctor was amazed I ever became pregnant at all, and even then, getting Maisey to term required spending most of the last three months of that pregnancy in bed. I’m blessed to have even one child, and I know it.
    Mother, on the other hand, didn’t want me , much less another child. I’m sure of it, although when I finally exploded one day in high school and accused her of that, she slapped me. She slapped me hard—I couldn’t have been more shocked. She had never spanked me or hit me in any other way until then, and for that isolated incident, she did not apologize. Looking back on it, I suppose what I said was unfair. She could have ended her pregnancy, illegal at the time but still an option; she could have put me up for adoption; she could have sent me off to boarding school. And she was merely grateful for Margaret and Hugh’s presence in our lives; she did not hire them to be my surrogate parents. She does not know I have called them that.
    Truthfully, and I imagine it was because of Margaret and Hugh and Paula, there were times I didn’t mind living in a home populated by only two quiet souls and one very nearly comatose fish, even when Mother was gone so much of the time. They say there are two kinds of people in this world: those energized by people and those energized by solitude. I’m sure I’m the latter. I need alone time. It keeps me relatively sane. But there’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. I know this, for I have been both alone and lonely.
    Lonely, I hated.
    And listening to Marcus, I realize I have no stories I want to tell, no tales from the condominium.
    I do have one especially lovely memory I cling to with a tenacity that puzzles me. I was in the ninth grade when a blizzard trapped Mother and me in our condo. Everything was shut