As Hope held her small cracked phone in her hands, she had a feeling her conversation wouldn’t lead anywhere. This was the third time today she’d reached out to her grandson, and she was hoping this time he’d at least answer. She put the phone on speaker so she could set it down on the table since her hands couldn’t hold onto it for longer than a few minutes without starting to hurt; her arthritis had been getting worse recently. “Hello?” Hope leaned back in her armchair excitedly.
“Michael, it’s so good to hear your voice!” Hope couldn’t believe that he’d actually picked up, but she was thrilled he had. “I’ve been trying to call all day. I need some help. It shouldn’t take that long, I swear.”
“Gome, this just isn’t a good time. I’m busy.” Hope frowned down at her phone and sighed.
“I’m moving into the nursing home soon. Don’t you want to say goodbye?”
“Sure, but I’ll come with Dad to drop you off. What do you even need?”
Hope shook her head, just to herself, and responded, “Just to wheel me down to the storage unit. I know that dad of yours said he’d pack up some necessities for me. I want to grab my sentimental stuff, so he doesn’t throw it away.”
Michael paused for a moment, long enough that Hope was worried he wasn’t there anymore, before answering, “Sorry, I just can’t.”
“Well, okay, Angel Bear, I’ll see you in a few days. I love you!” Michael hung up the phone without even saying goodbye or that he loved her. Hope frowned but figured that Michael was a busy young man, a senior in high school, and she knew how important his graduation was.
Hope decided to just ask Mimi for help getting down to her unit. Mimi was her day caregiver who’d been with her for about four years now, and tomorrow was her last day. After all the days they’d sat together, cramped into the small trailer, they had become friends, or at least Hope thought so. Mimi wheeled her down the rocky crumbled road to the storage facility directly in front of the small neighborhood filled with trailers Hope found disgusting; although she felt she had no room to talk, hers was the most disgusting of all. Her trailer was barely three hundred square feet with two tiny bedrooms, a small bathroom, and a kitchen-living area. In the past year, she’d spent ninety percent of her time in the kitchen-living area on a hospital bed she’d bought secondhand. She had to be careful when she walked around it because there was a hole in the floor that the owner said he would fix but hadn’t. Mimi and Hope had covered it with a rug, so they didn’t have to look at it, but that hadn’t really helped.
A LIFE LIVED
Analene McCullough
​
About a year ago, she’d fallen into the hole and almost broken her leg. Luckily one of the neighbors had heard her scream and came and helped Hope back into bed.
The storage unit was packed full of brown boxes, water-stained, and damaged by the four years they had sat in storage. Inside the storage unit sat the majority of Hope’s belongings, over eighty years of circumstances and mistakes jam-packed into a hundred square feet of grime. She could easily spot a box labeled “Lawsuit” in her own shaky penmanship. Hope remembered how she’d gotten involved with some legal nonsense back in the 1990s. She’d fallen off a bus while trying to exit, and some lawyer had convinced her to sue. She hadn’t gotten any money out of it, but Hope guessed at least testifying in court had been enjoyable.
None of her things meant anything to her only living son even though he lived just a couple hundred yards down the road. Hope acknowledged, just to herself, that mistakes had been made in Brian’s and her relationship. Still, she silently wished to herself he would be interested in any of the few things she had remaining once she died. Walking in, the first thing she noticed was her mother’s hutch, well-worn with age and lack of care. The once beautiful wood was stained and faded, the right side door broken. Just looking at it made her feel disappointed. Hope knew she couldn’t get down here very often to check on her things, but she’d hoped Brian, or at least one of his kids, would have checked to make sure the few remaining family heirlooms were kept safe.
Mimi offered to stay and help her, but Hope knew this was something she needed to process independently. She only had a few days left before moving into Bright Eyes Nursing Home, for good this time. The last time she stayed there, it had only been for a month after a stomach bacteria had caused her to become malnourished. It had been a nice place to stay, and she’d even had a nurse that reminded her of her oldest granddaughter, Tina. Brian had told her they couldn’t afford to continue paying for the storage unit. Hope had tried to ask why her pension and disability checks couldn’t keep covering it, but he had insisted, and she wasn’t going to keep questioning him since he handled all of her money. He’d told her that after putting her Medicare, pension, and disability towards her long-term stay, she’d only have thirty-eight dollars left a month, and that certainly wouldn’t cover the storage unit. She’d convinced herself that Brian always did his best, even if she had her doubts.
Holding onto her Rollator, Hope stood up and grasped the first box. Standing wasn’t always comfortable for Hope, at least not for more than a few minutes at a time. The Rollator had a seat she could rest on, and it was the only reason she’d told Mimi just to head back to the trailer. Hope had grabbed this box because it was haphazardly marked “Photographs” in a scrawl she recognized as belonging to Gerome, the only man who’d stood by her through all of her difficulties of the last fifty years. Although he repeatedly refused to marry her, he always doted on her even when she didn’t feel deserving. Hope remembered the last time she’d asked him to marry her; it had to have been about eight years ago now. They’d been
out to eat at their favorite Applebees talking about their day when she just decided to ask him pointblank. Gerome had explained to her, in his own unique way, that marriage just wasn’t for them, that he wasn’t prepared to deal with any of her medical issues- all the things he’d told her time and time again over the years. Although this was before the health conditions that now led to the nursing home, Hope guessed she understood, although, just to herself, she didn’t actually at all.
She took the pocket knife Mimi loaned her for this task and carefully, although shakily, slit open the box. The first picture on top was of a moment before her life had started to feel out of control. It was a photo of her family, almost sixty-five years ago now, smiling like there was no worry besides the simplicities of the 1950s. It was her, her ten-year-old brother, and the parents Hope so wished she could speak to right about now. She could remember so clearly, even though the photo was yellowed with age and damage, how soon after this photo she had started to show, although she would never confess, not even to the grandchildren she wished she saw more often, about the baby she would never know. Her parents were a Southern Baptist preacher and his devoted wife and knew best. At age fifteen, her parents sent her away to a farm owned by a distant relative, her great aunt Ruby, to give birth to the baby she had never planned.
In the 1950s, although girls got married younger, at least certainly younger than they did now, fifteen was much too young for a wedding. Her parents’ entire life and her father’s career primarily depended on their reputation in their town. Although giving birth had been one of the most traumatic experiences Hope could remember, living with her aunt Ruby had been an educational and entertaining experience. Ruby had taught her some of the best family recipes, including making Hope’s favorite pecan pie. She hadn’t made it for years now as the ingredients were too expensive, and she couldn’t stand for that long to roll out all that dough, but she could still remember the taste. Ruby had never judged young Hope, even when she told her the story of how she’d gotten pregnant. She’d told Hope to just focus on giving birth to a healthy baby for the adoptive parents.
All Hope had wanted was to have some fun with her boyfriend, a good old southern boy who she knew from church. The memory of giving birth to a tiny baby she never even got to hold
in a farmhouse bed was the one thing she could barely tell the truth about, even to herself. Hope didn’t know whether it was a boy or a girl because her mother, strong and dependable, had said it was better this way--better if she just forgot it happened and continued with her life in a small middle-of-nowhere town in Alabama. Cesterfield was a small town. When she’d last lived there, it only had about thirty-five hundred people, and back when she’d grown up there, it had just been incorporated as a town; before that, it was only a village.
Continue on she had, or at least she wanted to believe she had. Hope had left behind that boy and moved on, finding a man. As she tried to push old memories out of her mind, not easy in these days of the mundaneness of her old age, it was clear that wouldn’t be the path her mind would follow. Gerome, ever consistent and organized, had placed the photos in the box by supposed date. Hope remembered when she’d ask him to make sure her photos were preserved. It had been when she’d made the move to her trailer, four or so years ago. She saw the way Brian had haphazardly thrown most of her things together into boxes and trash bags and had asked Gerome to organize her photos. She had to be sure that someone would pack them carefully.
The next one was of her wedding photo, the only wedding she’d ever had although she’d always wanted another with Gerome. As Hope flipped over the picture to see if anything was written on it, her memories came flooding back. She could remember her mother towing her into the doctor’s office and asking for a discrete pregnancy test again. At just seventeen, Hope was pregnant for the second time, but this time her parents were not allowing a farm getaway. Seventeen was marrying age in Cesterfield, and a wedding was arranged in just six weeks. Hope Richards, high school student, became Hope Mulrooney, wife of Davis Mulrooney. In the picture, she could just barely see that under all the fluff of the dress and the rouge of her lipstick, there was just a young girl, still full of life but also full of a growing baby. In only six short months, Hope would give birth to an “early” and active baby boy, John Odis, but they’d just called him Odis, since John was her father.
His baby photo lay right beneath her wedding photo, and as Hope sagged against her walker, she wished so desperately that her oldest son was still alive. But the men in their family always have heart problems. Odis had always been the one most dedicated to his success and had
always been the one to tell her what to do, even if it was unwanted and unappreciated. In times when she struggled either with fiscal irresponsibility or melodrama, although he didn’t always give her time, affection, or love, that son, so unlike his father, would always make sure she was set in some course of action. He would always make sure her phone and lights were paid, but he would rarely visit and never let her spend unsupervised time with his daughter. Because of her own neglect of him and his brothers, she understood why, but it still caused her emotional anguish.
The nursing home had given her space for decorations and six small boxes that Mimi had left sitting next to her walker, so she could begin packing. She couldn’t imagine letting go of any of her photos, especially those of the days before the 1960s. Her memories of those years, while some sharp and poignant, were more generally vague, as so much of the last fifty years cluttered the space in her mind. Sliding all three photos into the plastic bag hanging off of her walker, she continued her rapidly devastating trip down memory lane. The next was another baby photo, this one of her only living son. When Brian had been born, Hope had already begun suspecting Davis was unfaithful, but at that time in Alabama, accusations like that could ruin a woman. To the public eye, Hope had the perfect nuclear family. If she made allegations of infidelity, it would hurt her already fragile reputation and her parents’ strong image in the community.
Furthermore, the shame on both her and Davis’s new woman would have been too much to bear. She had hoped that having another child, especially another boy, would change the way Davis had been disappearing. Presently, at eighty-one, Hope could almost laugh at the idea of Davis Mulrooney being faithful to anybody; it just wasn’t his way. She had been his first wife, but certainly not his last. When she heard he had died, he was married to his fifth wife.
Slipping the photo into the bag, Hope looked back into the box. Her jaw dropped open in amazement; It was a photo, a little polaroid really, of what Hope had hoped would represent a fresh start for her family. She’d figured over the years it would have broken down or disintegrated. The Navy transferred Davis from Alabama to San Diego, and instead of leaving Hope and the kids at home with her parents, he moved them all to a cramped house in Hillcrest, a rapidly-expanding suburb near the base. In the picture, she was smiling, that ever-present smile
Davis expected, holding Brian in her arms while Odis looked up at his daddy from the ground. Davis’s smirk that at the time Hope had wished had just been the way he smiled, looked terrifying to her now. She could hardly remember now whether she was pregnant again before he had left her or not, since he had moved just across the street. She placed it distinctly- three years after they’d moved there, when he’d packed his bags and told her he was moving in with the gal he’d been sleeping with, their catty-corner neighbor Hope had befriended when they’d first moved in.
Hope could hardly believe her eyes when she saw the next photo, Odis and Brian sitting together with a white sheet serving as a background. This photo had been given to Hope by her parents when she’d finally returned home from her “California Experience,” as her mother had referred to it for many years. She’d been told this photo was of her children when they had first been taken into foster care. Although she hated to admit it, her institutionalization had been the end of any chance of a good or at least a healthy relationship with her children. If Odis hadn’t found the paperwork after her mother died, her children might never have known the extent of her mental struggle.
The day Odis had walked in to find her passed out with her head in the oven, had been the beginning of the end of their relationship, even though he was just five years old. She knew then he didn’t fully understand the implications of her actions, but as he grew, so did his understanding and his disdain. Hope remembered trying to cling to everything for so long, but that day, in 1961, when she’d watched Davis walk out of the house to their younger neighbor’s for the last time, she just couldn’t handle it anymore. Brian had been in his crib and Odis at school, and she thought maybe they’d be better off with Davis and that woman, likely his next wife. But Odis had hopped off the bus, seen his mother seemingly asleep on the kitchen floor with her head in the oven, and tried to wake her. But when he couldn’t, he’d run to the widow next door, Mrs. Foster. That neighbor had come to the door and knocked so loud and so long, eventually she just came inside and dragged Hope out. By the time she had regained consciousness, the police had arrived, and so had Davis.
She wasn’t particularly sure what the paperwork said. Still, within a week, she was sitting in a Navy mental hospital, later finding out her children had been placed into emergency foster care. When she discovered this, she also found
out that Davis hadn’t come forward to claim the boys, having requested a navy transfer and a divorce. Hope remembered finally reaching her parents through a telegram to the Midtown police station, where her father worked as a sergeant and a chaplain. They had come to check her out after the mandatory three months, and she was showing yet again, but her mother merely bit back a remark, shook her head, and paid for a slightly bigger train cabin for the trip back.
Hope assumed she knew what the next picture would be, and she was right. It was the baby photo of Willie her mother had insisted on, although Hope had just wanted to pretend like none of this was happening. Her parents were still trying to search the California foster care system for Odis and Brian, all the while insisting Hope get some sort of job or education. She vaguely remembered that after a year of calls and correspondence, her parents had finally been able to convince the court that they had claim to the boys and should be released into their custody.
The next few years of Hope’s life were ones she barely remembered, between the alcohol and the drugs, and she was surprised she’d only landed herself in jail for a year. She’d been trying to find a man who could be a good stepfather for her boys. By this point, or at least the way she remembered it, her children were living full-time with her parents, who had gained custody. The only reason they hadn’t adopted them sooner was because California had no idea they existed or where they were. Hope had met many men in the bars she frequented, although none of them were particularly good ones. The one who had gotten her in trouble with the law, though, was the one she honestly thought would be a good man. Stephen was from up north and had told her he moved to Cesterfield to find a quieter place. He had told her that he needed her to cash a few checks for him, saying that the people at the bank just didn’t like him. She’d done it without thinking, and apparently, and unfortunately, they were forged.
Hope remembered the Christmas when Odis was seven, Brian was six, and Willie was two. She had shown up to her parents’ house unannounced, having just been released, bearing a load of gifts for the kids: bikes, battery-operated cars, and all the sports equipment she could fit in the car. She’d known she couldn’t afford it, but she had no idea that if she purchased it all on credit, sixty days later, the companies would come to her parents’ house and take away all of the presents.
Hope knew that this had been another moment for which Odis had neither forgotten nor forgiven, mostly since she’d done it again just a year later. It hadn’t been a remotely pleasant or healthy time in her life, and Hope could admit that, even if only to herself. She was wholly unsurprised there weren’t many photos from this time.
The following picture in the box was finally one that could make her smile. It had been taken on her fourth or fifth date with Gerome. She wasn’t entirely sure which one, as they all began to run together, but these dates were a lively, bright light in her memory, even now. Her father had been offered two new jobs in a small town about an hour outside New Orleans, Louisiana, named Riverwood. Although to Hope, it didn’t seem small, and he had abruptly moved her mother and her children there. They hadn’t even planned on telling her, but in small-town 1965 Alabama, news of a beloved police officer and minister packing up and leaving traveled fast. When they’d moved, Hope had quickly followed behind, settling herself in New Orleans. Her commute to her job as a civilian computer programmer for the Navy was short, but the distance to her children was longer than she’d liked. She and Gerome had ridden the same bus for a month when he’d asked if he could sit next to her. To Hope, he was then and remained now a handsome man with a heavy New Orleans accent that seemed to wash her body with comfort and appeal every time he said her name. After another two weeks of sitting on the bus talking together, Gerome asked to buy her dinner. On that fourth or fifth date pictured, Gerome had brought his Polaroid camera, asking a waiter to snap a picture of them smiling broadly. She could never have imagined this man, who asked her on a date while riding on the bus, would become the man who’d stayed by her side through everything from taking care of grandkids to helping remind her of things forgotten.
The picture box included so many photos of her first twenty years in Louisiana, and she wasn’t surprised. During the seventies, Hope had honestly tried to do her best to work hard and become the woman she’d always wanted to be, secure in her self-worth. She had known she would never secure the approval of her parents, or Odis at this point, but Brian and Willie still hadn’t known the full extent of why they lived with their grandparents. She tried to reconnect with her family during these years, and Gerome had been her greatest champion. In 1975, Odis graduated high school, about which Hope had been fiercely
proud. She remembered being so excited about being invited, even if it wasn’t his idea. In the photo, Hope could see the smirk on his face, so much like his father’s that it almost hurt to look at, full of mockery and vitriol. But on her own, Hope saw excitement and pride. She recalled that the Hope of 1975 was so ready to see her eldest son succeed, and although she’d watched his adult life from afar, 2020 Hope was thrilled she had been correct.
As Hope sifted through the plethora of photos she’d saved since 1975, a picture of a building caught her eye. It was one of the administrative buildings at Southeastern Louisiana University, and she remembered taking it proudly. When Odis had attended there, although he’d left after a year, she had been so delighted that she enrolled as well. It was part-time, but Hope remembered wondering if maybe it could be a way to further her career. She also hoped it could be a way to reconnect with Odis. Hope had taken the photo right before she’d encountered him on campus for the first time. Odis hadn’t been thrilled about her presence and, for the next year, had disregarded and rebuked her at every turn. After he’d completed his first year, he had received a scholarship to his dream school, the University of Alabama, and she remembered feeling permanently left behind. But then Brian had graduated high school and come to Southeastern as well, and although her connection with Odis was severed, hers with Brian began to grow.
He seemingly needed her for the first time because his loans didn’t cover everything, and Hope was so excited she’d entrusted him with the money with no expectation for repayment. She remembered doing so time and time again as he’d continued through college and graduate school. His education had lasted for twenty years, and he had lived off his student loans quite a bit. She was immensely proud to have had a hand in his education, and when Hope realized she had to stop taking classes to pay for his, she did so without a thought.
These next photos were quite a jump in time, but not that much since Willie had married at eighteen because of his wife’s pregnancy. Hope smiled fondly at the photos of her grandchild, Tina, right after she was born. She was Willie’s f irst child and Hope’s first grandchild, and she was thrilled Willie had proposed she move in for a short time. She looked at the stack of photos rubber-banded together with affection; they were photos she had taken of Tina over the first few years of her life. As Hope began to flip through them, she looked at the back of one with a tiny
mousy-looking Tina holding her arms up in the air towards Hope. On it was written, “Her first time calling me Gome,” and Hope giggled to herself. Sometimes she forgot why all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren called her Gome.
But as she looked at the picture of Tina, now almost forty with adult children of her own, she remembered so vividly when Willie had laughed at Tina saying, “Go me” while asking Hope if she could go home with her. This was after Hope had moved out of Willie and his wife’s home, and he had sarcastically said maybe Tina should just call her that. It was a fleeting memory that Hope cherished. Her youngest son, her baby boy, the only one who never held any contempt for her, had died in 2005, just a few months after Hurricane Katrina. It had devastated her, and what had hurt the worst is that Tina, although sad, was comfortable with a child of her own and a stepfather she loved more than her actual one.
As she continued digging through the box, Hope was surprised to see Odis’s wedding photos. Although he and his wife, Lynn, had gotten married in an out-of-state wedding to which she wasn’t invited, they’d had a reception after returning home. Hope had been thrilled to be invited and even offered to buy their cake. She’d convinced her mother-in-law to come with her as well. Hope and Imelda had run into each other when she visited Brian and his wife, Alice, who had recently moved to Alabama. She was so surprised Imelda had been kind to her after all those years; it’d been virtually twenty-five years since Hope had last seen her, and she had been thrilled when Imelda had wanted to come down to New Orleans to see her grandson. In the pictures, Odis looked so happy, and Hope knew that even though his marriage hadn’t always been the easiest, Lynn had been one of the most influential people in his life, besides his daughter once she’d been born, and had been the best influence on him.
As Hope reached closer to the bottom of the box, she moved slowly to her storage unit entrance, looked up at the sky, and was shocked to see it was getting dark. Mimi would likely be back soon since she had to leave for the day around six. Hope hadn’t managed to get anything packed, but there were only a few pictures left in the box, so she figured she might as well finish this today. She pulled the last photo out of the box and smiled fondly. It was the one photograph she had of herself with all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Tina, Willie’s daughter, her children Sage and Madison, Michael and Kassie,
Brian’s children; and Abigail, Odis’s daughter. Although she loved the photograph, she had to remind herself it had been taken at a negative point in time for everyone pictured. Odis had just died, leaving his wife and thirteen-year-old daughter as well as the rest of his dysfunctional family in shock. When Hope had shown up at the funeral, she was greeted by a granddaughter she barely knew and a daughter-in-law uninterested in encouraging that relationship. She understood Lynn’s apprehension, since she knew Odis hadn’t always spoken tenderly of her. But Hope remembered hugging her granddaughter, her little Angel Eyes, so-called because of her crystal blue eyes from the very first time they opened, and wishing the hug had held even an ounce of the affection she’d hoped it would. Her granddaughter had hugged her back, of course, but let go quickly before running off to find someone she knew better. Hope frowned to herself. Although this picture was marvelous, it also reminded her of how few genuine relationships she had left with her family.
Hope slowly walked herself back into her unit and sat rifling through the box of both broken memories and photos she held dear. She pulled out a small stack of photos rubber-banded together. As she flipped through them, she was bewildered as she recognized so few of them. As she looked at the handwriting on the back, she saw it was her own, although so shaky that she barely recognized it. As she read the notes and dates on the end, she concluded they were taken at the nursing home where she had stayed, and Tina worked after her brain injury. Hope didn’t remember much from this time, or even really how she’d injured herself. She only remembered arguing with her roommate, Theresa, a younger lady she’d met through her post-retirement job at the airport who’d she’d known was volatile but never violent, and then Hope found herself in the hospital. She’d been told that she had tripped and fallen in the living room where she’d hit her head on a large trunk of Theresa’s. It seemed odd that she’d fallen suddenly, and looking back, she realized that once again, she’d found herself in a relationship with more give than take. Theresa had been untrustworthy from the start but the only person willing to move in with Hope, in her partially-retired state.
When she woke up, her whole family surrounded her. Although she’d seen them six months prior at Odis’s service, it felt like a lifetime. Hope smiled down at the pictures of some of her grandkids sitting around her hospital bed.
As Hope recollected it, this was when Brian and Lynn both became her powers of attorney. At the time, she hadn’t been sure what that meant, but Lynn said that both she and Brian would have them so Lynn would be able to help make decisions too. At the time, Hope knew Lynn would assist Brian in making the right decisions because she worked in some kind of law, although Hope had no idea what kind, and because Lynn would do what she knew Odis would have done. But as Hope reached the last photo in this pile, she saw it was from when she’d moved from the nursing home to her trailer. Lynn and Tina had tried convincing her not to go, but Brian was just so sure it was the best decision for her that he had practically made it himself.
This was also when Lynn had given up her power of attorney, leaving Brian as the person in charge of her money and her future. Lynn had told her that if she was going to live out in the country near Brian, she was giving control over to him entirely. Hope wasn’t sure exactly where all her money went, but she entrusted her only remaining child to do what he thought was best for her because he loved her. She had been telling herself this for the last four years. But since she’d made the recent decision to finally move back to a nursing home, Brian had been pressing about money issues. To Hope, it seemed like he was nervous. She had asked him if he wanted any of her things, but she was reasonably sure he wouldn’t want any of them unless they were worth something more than mere sentimental value. The box of photographs of Hope’s life sat empty on the floor of the seemingly small storage unit which housed the majority of her possessions. At eighty-one, the small hunched-over woman resting on the seat of her Rollator, had spent the day recalling the life she had lived. It hadn’t been effortless, but as she looked at the plastic bag stuffed full of photos, Hope thought half hopelessly to herself, “Has this been what all my life has led to?” She looked around at her surroundings and just outside the storage unit where she could see down the rows of trailers, just spotting Brian’s trailer, fading with age and leaning towards the left. Hope knew if she looked a little further, she could see her own. It was the most insignificant place she had ever lived, including the rooms she’d shared at prior nursing homes. She remembered when she first moved in, Alice and Brian hadn’t even attempted to clean it, and Hope was just thankful Lynn and Tina
had come to visit and made it feel like a home.
As she looked at the photographs telling the story of her life, Hope wished she could have a conversation with her mother, Odis, or even her great aunt Ruby. All of these people whom she’d loved dearly and relied on had died, leaving Hope sitting alone in a storage unit. As she let her mind wander to what her life was and what it could have been, she heard the noise of a loud truck engine outside. Hope pushed herself off the seat of her Rollator and once again gradually moved herself outside. When she looked up, she was surprised to see Brian sitting in the front seat. He climbed out, his considerable size meaning that it took him longer than it might have taken someone else.
“Mom, Michael told me that you were comin’ down here, so I figured I’d come see what you got done.” Brian ambled over towards Hope and then passed by her to look inside the unit, not stopping to even glance at his elderly mother and the photographs she held in her hand. Hope wheeled closer to him and rested a hand against his arm.
“I only really went through some photos; I’m hoping you’ll be able to maybe get them laminated or something so I can hang them up in my new room. I thought maybe Kassie could come down and help me since Mimi’s last day is tomorrow?”
“Mom, didn’t I tell you, Alice moved out, told me that if I couldn’t stop… well, doing something she didn’t like, she was leavin’. And she did, took Kassie and the car and just left. It’s why I had to go buy that truck out there. Me and Michael needed something to drive.”
Hope looked at her middle son astonished, her eyes glistening with tears. “When did this even happen? I know we haven’t talked much about anything but my move for a while, but why didn’t you tell me?”
Brian shook his head and sighed, “Mom, I don’t tell you a lot of things, and this was just one of them. I’ll see if Michael can help you, but really, just one box of photos?”
“Brian, I think we have to talk before I move, maybe tonight over dinner?”
“About what? Michael has something for school tonight, so he’ll need the truck.”
Hope bit her lip and looked up at her son. “At your trailer then. I’ll walk down, or at least I’ll try.”
“Sure, Mom, I’ll order some pizza or something. But what’s so important that we have to talk?”
“I want to talk about my life, maybe show you some pictures.”