A Family Affair Read Online Free PDF

staring at the bed. It was a double, covered with a
light chenille spread, no accent pillows or fancy afghans draped at
the foot like her mother preferred. Was this the bed? Christine
turned away and closed the door.
    She worked her way back to the living room,
sat in the rocking chair, coat still on. He’d come here every month
for years and yet the place looked unused. Where were the copies of
the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, James Michener’s, The Centennial,
a gift she’d given him at Christmas? Hadn’t he told her he was
taking it with him on his next trip? Where was anything that hinted
a body moved about, within these walls, lived a life, even if it
were only four days a month?
    The answer was sitting there, around the ring
of rust in the bathroom sink, on the coffee table filmed with a
fine layer of dust, in the shininess of the navy ceramic
ashtray.
    He’d told them all a great, fantastic story
of the rejuvenating powers found in this cabin hundreds of miles
away from everything, where he could think. It had all seemed so
noble then, inconvenient, yes, but noble. How many other lies had
he told? Tomorrow she’d have her answers.
    She didn’t know how long she sat in the
rocking chair, coat on, hands clenched together, staring into the
blue emptiness of the ashtray perched on the edge of the coffee
table. Eventually, she got up, went to the refrigerator and found
it empty except for a box of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda. She
quietly closed the door and made her way to the bedroom, kicked off
her shoes and laid down on the left side of the bed, the side her
father always slept on. She didn’t pull down the chenille spread,
not even to rest her head on the pillow. And then exhaustion took
over and she slept.
    ***
    Magdalena was exactly seventy-eight miles
from Tristan. Christine woke up to the pre-dawn sounds of birds and
some other unnamed wood creatures. Her back was stiff, her legs
sore, her head pounding. And she was starving. Food wasn’t
something she thought about much, not the way her mother did,
arranging and presenting it with such dignity. Christine preferred
ordering out or microwave ready, the faster the better, easy
cleanup, better yet.
    She rolled off the bed, stared at the
chenille spread, crumpled from sleep. The questions wouldn’t stop,
not until she found the one woman who held the answers, and then,
there might be hundreds more. She stripped off her coat, took a
quick rinse in the porcelain tub, scrubbed her face, her teeth,
pulled a comb through her thick hair and put on the same jeans
she’d worn the day before. She reached into her suitcase and
grabbed the first shirt she found, a black turtleneck. Ten minutes
later she was on the road, stopping only at a 7 Eleven to grab a
large coffee and a sweet roll.
    She entered the outskirts of Magdalena
seventy-eight miles later and began to wonder if she should’ve
taken a bit more time preparing for this meeting. Perhaps she
should’ve worn her pearls, a business suit, flipped her hair in a
chignon. In business, the aura of ‘inapproachability’ had served
her well, gained access into boardrooms, earned invitations and
introductions. Her personal life hadn’t reaped the same benefits,
not that it had suffered, but it hadn’t thrived. Aside from Connor,
who was a family friend, many men thought her too standoffish. She
wasn’t, not really, it was more a cloak she donned to protect
herself from overexposure, like sunscreen, a way to avoid the
undesirable effects of undesirable people, men in particular.
    Since the moment she heard Lily Desantro’s
name, she’d thought of the second when she’d see the woman and a
name and a face would merge, one breathing life into the other to
form a person, a memory, a past where all supposition would fade
into features and voice and realness.
    Christine followed the road to the edge of
town; to the street on the back of the business card Thurman Jacobs
had given her. 1167 Artisdale Street. The houses on