Chapter 2 - NINE SUMMERS WITHOUT ME
The first summer they left me with Aunt Ruth, I was eleven years old.
My parents told people I preferred the country.
I did not.
I wanted to go to California with them.
I wanted to see the ocean, eat breakfast in a hotel and stand beside my family when strangers offered to take photographs.
Instead, Mom packed my clothes into an old canvas bag and drove me six hours north from our home in Colorado to Ruth’s farmhouse outside Elk Ridge, Montana.
The farmhouse leaned slightly toward the east pasture. The porch railing was loose. Rain entered through two places in the roof. Half the kitchen cabinets did not close.
My parents called it rustic when they were being polite.
They called it a ruin when Ruth could hear them.
They left Tyler’s suitcase in the trunk.
He was seven, blond, thin and naturally comfortable in front of cameras. I was eleven, awkward, wearing thick hearing aids and still carrying a pale scar across one side of my jaw from a childhood car accident.
Mom believed every family trip needed matching clothes and perfect photographs.
She never said the scar embarrassed her directly.
She said beach humidity was bad for my hearing devices.
She said long flights would overwhelm me.
She said Ruth needed company.
Then she posted eighty-three photographs from San Diego.
Tyler appeared in seventy-six.
I appeared in none.
The second summer was Hawaii.
The third was New York and Cape Cod.
Then came London, Italy, a Caribbean cruise, Yellowstone in a luxury lodge and two weeks in France.
Every year, my parents told me the trip would be too difficult, too crowded or too expensive for an additional person.
Every year, Tyler went.
I stayed at the farmhouse.
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At first, I counted the days until they returned.
By the fourth summer, I stopped.
