Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 67271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 336(@200wpm)___ 269(@250wpm)___ 224(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 336(@200wpm)___ 269(@250wpm)___ 224(@300wpm)
The picture had captured one of the rare moments where she’d actually smiled with her braces on, and I hadn’t been looking directly at the camera. No, my gaze had been just off center, focused on her, and we’d each held up the mugs of what had to be my mom’s hot cocoa. Damn, I thought to myself. My brothers were right; I really couldn’t hide my feelings.
I heard water running, and I turned around to see the bathroom door open next to me as Lucy came out.
“What are you looking at?” she asked, smiling as she came into the hall.
“This,” I said, gesturing with my chin at the photo. She came closer, and I couldn’t help breathing deeply as she stood next to me. I inhaled her warm, fresh scent of lavender and green hay and allowed it to wash over me as she leaned forward to examine the photo more carefully.
“You know,” she said, turning around to face me once more, “it’s funny. Your face and the expressions that you make are almost the same, but….” She tilted her head to look at me, her smile growing across her face, “it’s almost like you look more like yourself than you ever have.” She shrugged. “I don’t know if that makes sense.”
“It does.” My voice was pitched low, and I was afraid that I would give everything away just by saying one more word. But in that moment, I didn’t know if I cared. I would’ve given anything to continue standing there, being looked at like that by her.
“You don’t live here anymore, do you?”
I blinked at her. “No; I have an apartment in town. Why?”
She shrugged. “I just wanted to see if that Good Morning, Vietnam poster followed you to your new place.”
I smiled in amazement at her memory. It was hard for me to realize that she still recalled what my favorite movie had been as a teenager. “It didn’t. Do you want to see?”
“Sure.”
I led her down the hall to the small room that I’d grown up in, flipping on the lights as I entered.
Coming in here always caught me just a little bit off guard. Even though I lived just a few minutes away from my parents and spent almost every day on their property, I didn’t make it a habit to go into my old room very often. I wasn’t like Andy, escaping inside at every opportunity to get just a little bit more writing done.
As a result, the slightly musty smell of my old bedroom always hit me in the same way, as did all of the posters hanging on the walls. There was an enormous, framed diagram of several breeds of horses that my grandfather had given me as a kid, telling me that it was up to me to study as hard as I could to know my work to the best of my ability.
The aforementioned poster from Good Morning, Vietnam was indeed still hanging on the wall, with Robin Williams’s smiling face glinting out from the old, faded poster. There was a good number of other photos hanging on the wall, one or two of me playing flag football in middle school, and a few of me standing with my brothers around the ranch.
“Holy shit,” Lucy said, looking around the room. “It’s just like stepping into a time capsule.” She looked around at everything, from the pictures hanging on the walls to the bedspread, which she dragged her hand across as if in absent thought. She turned back around, leaning against the desk and setting her small, pert ass on the edge of it as she took me in. “Are all of your rooms kept like this? Perfectly intact?”
“Yep,” I said with a nod, walking over to sit on the bed. “We’ve been trying to tell my mom for years to do whatever she wants with the rooms, but she’s been insisting that the rooms be kept exactly the same. She doesn’t want to update them at all.” I shrugged. “The result is that no one uses these rooms for anything… except for Andy, who uses his for exactly the same thing he did when we were kids.”
“You mean running away from everything he has to get done to write?”
“Yep. That’s exactly it.”
“Why does your mom say she wants to keep them like this?” she said. “That’s a lot of space going unused in her house.”
“She says that one day, she wants her grandkids to be able to see the rooms that their dads grew up in so that they can know them for the kids they were while they were becoming who they are.”
She paused, biting down on those rich, crimson lips. The sudden gesture made me want to lean forward and add my own mouth to the mix. “That might just be the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. “I love how she’s thinking of her grandchildren that way.”