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“It’s easier to see now that he doesn’t have that unkempt beard,” Aunt Izzie said.
“Those dimples.” Dana paused to take a bite of bacon. “Yummy.” I wasn’t sure if she was talking about her breakfast or Hank, and I wasn’t about to ask.
“It was a lovely article on Pendleton,” Aunt Izzie said. “I’m glad you were able to put your differences aside to write it.”
“How come you never told me Hank invested in DeMarco’s Diner?”
Aunt Izzie stilled. “Hank told you that?”
“He was lying, wasn’t he?”
My aunt shook her head. It was the loudest headshake I’d ever heard. “What else did he tell you about that time?”
The way she leaned toward me as she waited for me to answer reinforced my gut feeling not to take Hank up on his offer of telling me about his life when he returned to Stapleton. Whatever he had to say, I didn’t want to hear. “Nothing.” I stood and busied myself at the sink, filling Oliver’s portable water bowl. I didn’t want to field more questions about Hank, so I made my way toward the basement door. “I’ll put the patio furniture out.”
“It’s too heavy. I can wait for Kyle,” Aunt Izzie said.
“Dana and I can do it.”
I made my way down the steep, narrow staircase. With each step I took, the musty scent became stronger. At the bottom, I snapped on a light, revealing a chaotic mess that was the exact opposite of the neat and orderly upstairs. Wobbly stacks of cardboard boxes leaned against walls, threatening to tumble over if someone exhaled. Old wooden chairs formed a line in the center of the room, with a few others piled on top of each other off to the side as if a game of musical chairs had been interrupted. Clothes spilled out of plastic bins with cracked covers. Paperback books with yellow pages filled lopsided bookcases. Box and window fans coated with layers of dust lay on their sides.
I broke into a sneezing fit.
There were footsteps on the staircase. Dana reached the bottom. “What a dump.”
“The patio furniture is in the back right corner,” Aunt Izzie hollered. “Be careful down there.”
As we made our way across the cellar, I noticed a familiar-looking long black-and-red aluminum rectangle sticking out from behind a pile of boxes, the sign from my parents’ restaurant. I rushed across the room and pulled it out, tracing the dusty letters that spelled outDEMARCO’SDINERwith my index finger. Touching the sign made me feel connected to my parents in a way I hadn’t since they died. I looked around the room, expecting to see them, but of course they weren’t there.
“I thought Hank threw this away when he renovated the restaurant,” Dana said. She glanced at it, but something in one of the cardboardboxes seemed to catch her attention. She wandered off in its direction and knelt in front of it, rummaging through the contents. “Look at this.” She held up a 1976 yearbook from Mount Stapleton Community High School. “This must be Aunt Izzie’s. I wonder if Mom’s is in here too.” She dug through the box, pulling out old photo albums and another yearbook, this one from 1979, the year our mother had graduated.
As she went through the yearbook, I flipped open one of the photo albums. Baby pictures of my aunt and mother stared back at me. There were footsteps on the stairway. Aunt Izzie made her way down with Oliver trotting along behind her. “What are you gi—are those my old photo albums? Don’t touch those.” She rushed down the remaining stairs, tripped on the bottom one, and fell to the cement floor in a heap. Oliver whimpered as if he had been injured and stood guard over her.
Dana raced across the room while I froze, shocked by what I’d witnessed.
“Are you okay?” my sister asked.
Aunt Izzie grimaced as she pushed herself up to a sitting position. I shook myself from my trance, and Dana and I helped Aunt Izzie to her feet. “You were supposed to be down here getting the patio furniture, not snooping,” she said.
“I saw the DeMarco’s Diner sign. I didn’t know you had that.”
“I’d forgotten all about it. Hank gave it to me years ago.”
“Can I have it?”
“Be my guest.” Aunt Izzie limped toward the other side of the basement and returned the yearbooks and photo albums to the box. “The patio furniture is over there.” She pointed to the back corner. Dana and I hoisted the table and chairs out of the bulkhead while Aunt Izzie stood by the box with her arms folded across her chest as if she were protecting the queen’s jewels.
Chapter 28
Wednesday night, Kyle pushed his dinner around his plate but barely ate any of his food. “I’m just not hungry.” He scraped the steak off his plate into the dog’s bowl. He hadn’t had an appetite all week, which was most unlike him.
Oliver charged into the room, almost knocking Kyle off his feet. “Damn it, Oliver.”
“Hey, don’t talk to him in that tone,” I said.
“Sorry, buddy.” Kyle stroked Oliver’s back. The dog didn’t notice. He had his face buried in his dish, gobbling down Kyle’s meat.
“What’s going on with you?” I asked. “You’ve been on edge for days.” Twice this week, I had woken up alone in bed in the predawn hours and found him sitting in his recliner in the dark living room, staring out into the black night.
