The little truck’s front wheel was still spinning when Claire Mercer reached the family room. It clicked against a brass floor vent, slowing between each turn. Beyond it, three boys stood in a tight row across the front of a piano.
Claire stopped in the doorway. Someone had pulled the cushions apart at their seams. White stuffing lay in the grooves of the hardwood, and purple paint ran down the pale wall behind a sofa that had been dragged crooked. One corner rested on a splintered leg.
She had arrived at the Ashford house eight minutes earlier. The woman who let her in had taken her coat, indicated this room, and disappeared with the strained efficiency of someone late for an appointment elsewhere.
Now the largest of the boys moved one foot forward.
“Leave that alone.”
Claire followed his stare. A photograph lay facedown beside the piano, its silver frame sitting in spilled green paint. She could see a crack through the glass where one corner had tipped up.
“I haven’t touched anything,” she said.
“You were going to.”
She set her handbag on a dry patch of floor instead of answering. At her interview, Daniel Ashford had shown her a picture of his sons at a school concert. Lucas had been the one studying the audience, Ben the one smiling at somebody off camera, and Sam the one holding his brothers’ hands.
At six, they still shared the same round cheeks. But Lucas stood as though he expected to be struck. Ben kept pinching the back of Lucas’s shirt, and Sam had a toy fire engine tucked beneath his chin.
“We already know what you’re here for,” Lucas said. “You can go.”
“My name’s Claire.”
“So?”
“So you won’t have to keep calling me you.”
Ben almost looked at her. Lucas kicked a small car across the floor. It struck her shoe and left a green crescent on the leather.
“We didn’t ask for you. We want our mom.”
Claire let the car remain where it had landed. Then she gathered her skirt at the knees and sat down, well beyond his reach. The cotton settled into a wet streak of paint.
Sam noticed. His eyes moved from the stain to her face.
“I’m not here to take her place,” she said.
“You don’t get to say anything about her.”
“All right.”
Lucas had been drawing breath for another argument. He held it for a second, then let it out through his nose.
Claire glanced at the space between the brothers. Ben had not released the shirt.
“I used to work hard at making grown-ups give up on me,” she said. “Then, when they went, I could tell myself I’d sent them away.”
Lucas scowled. “Maybe nobody wanted you.”
“Sometimes I thought that, too.”
The house’s heating system came on with a low rush. A loose scrap of cushion filling lifted and caught beneath the piano bench.
Sam spoke without moving the fire engine from his mouth. “Where was your mom?”
“She and my dad died in a house fire. I was seven.”
Ben’s fingers loosened. “Your dad, too?”
Claire nodded.
“Where did you go?”
“Foster homes. Different families took care of me.” She rubbed a spot of paint between her fingertips. “I didn’t make it easy. I wanted to know how much trouble it took before somebody decided I wasn’t worth it.”
“Did they decide that?” Ben asked.
“A few people left. A few kept showing up, even when I made them tired.”
Lucas shifted to block something beneath the piano. Claire had noticed the cardboard only as part of the wreckage. Now she could see an open storage carton behind his ankle. A yellow cardigan lay over the corner of a frame. Tissue paper, a holiday ornament, and a drawing in thick crayon protruded from a torn flap.
RACHEL ASHFORD—BELONGINGS had been written across the lid.
“Those are hers?” Claire asked.
Lucas bent at once, gripping both sides of the carton. “You’re not taking it.”
“I’m staying over here.”
“Mrs. Haskell said we had to stop getting it out,” Ben said.
His brother rounded on him, and Ben’s eyes dropped.
Claire kept her voice level. “Was Mrs. Haskell taking care of you?”
“She said looking at Mom made us worse,” Sam murmured.
“She said Dad wanted things put away.” Lucas tugged the carton closer to his shins. “Like before.”
Claire waited until he looked at her again.
“Would you let me look inside?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
She smoothed her skirt against her knees. He watched her hands, plainly waiting for one of them to reach.
“The stairs picture was in there,” Ben said after a while. “And the funny birthday one from the kitchen.”
“Mom had frosting here.” Sam touched the end of his nose with one grubby finger.
“So you found the pictures.”
“She hid them,” Lucas said. “Behind the coats. We found them.”
Beside Claire’s shoe lay the car he had kicked. A brush had dried inside its open door. She looked from it to the dragged sofa, then to the space behind the piano where the carton had been pushed.
Lucas lifted one flap, trying to cover the contents. A sheet of paper had been fastened to its underside with clear tape. Claire recognized the small embossed monogram from Daniel’s correspondence.
She leaned forward just enough to read.
The approval concerned Rachel’s possessions. Photographs and personal effects were to be cleared from shared rooms; removing reminders, it said, would help the children adjust to bereavement.
A pair of handwritten initials occupied the authorization line.
D.A.
Lucas pulled the flap against his body, but she had already seen them.
“Who put that paper there?” she asked.
“Mrs. Haskell. So we’d know it was allowed.”
Claire pressed her painted fingers against her skirt. In the hall, a latch clicked. A gust of damp September air reached the room before the front door closed.
All three boys moved at once. Ben caught Lucas’s arm. Sam backed into Ben, clutching his truck so hard that one ladder dug into his cheek. Lucas snatched the fallen photograph from the floor.
“Careful of the glass,” Claire said quietly.
He held it by the edges, its painted back against his shirt.
The man who appeared in the doorway looked older than the man who had interviewed her. Daniel Ashford’s collar was open, his raincoat still folded over one wrist. He took in the sofa, the wall, Claire’s stained skirt. Then his gaze caught on the frame Lucas was holding.
“Boys—”
Lucas hauled the box flap upright.
“Was getting rid of Mom your idea?”
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇