Chapter 6 - The People Who Chose Sides
My aunt Denise drove down from Oak Ridge with a casserole and opinions.
“Julian has always been difficult,” she said in the hospital family lounge, “but you know your mother can be dramatic.”
“Dramatic?” I repeated.
Denise pressed her lips together. “I’m saying don’t turn this into a criminal circus if it’s really a family mess.”
That was the emotional fallout nobody prepares you for. Not when a family breaks, but when everyone starts deciding what kind of breaking they can live with.
My cousin Mark, Denise’s son, arrived an hour later and sat beside me without asking permission. “I was at Julian’s place two months ago,” he said. “He had a new bass boat picked out. Chloe was talking about quartz countertops. I remember thinking it was weird.”
That shifted something.
So did the call from APS. They had interviewed a home-health aide who used to stop by twice a week after my mother’s fall in February. Her name was Tasha Reed. She said Julian canceled the service after only three visits and told the agency my mother was “too combative.”
“Did she ever mention bruises?” I asked.
“Not directly,” the APS worker said. “But the aide noted your mother seemed frightened when your brother entered the room.”
Mom listened quietly when I told her. Then she reached for my wrist with startling strength.
“Don’t drag Owen into this,” she said.
“Who?”
“Julian’s boy. He hears too much.”
Julian and Chloe didn’t have children.
At least, that was what I almost said before I remembered Chloe’s sixteen-year-old son from her first marriage, the one who had been sent to live with his father in Chattanooga last spring.
“What did Owen hear?”
My mother let go of my wrist and stared at the blanket. “Enough to stop coming over.”
May you like
By evening, one more person had stepped half out of Julian’s shadow.
I called Tasha myself, and the first thing she said was, “I didn’t think your mother was the one anybody needed protection from.”
