A Very Typical Family

by Sierra Godfrey

When she finally got home, Natalie was ready to collapse. She made some calming tea but sensed this would be inadequate. A chocolate assist was definitely in order.

I know this feeling!

Natalie was very good at forgetting things she didn’t want to remember. She’d spent fifteen years honing this skill. She was a master at it.

wrapped up in memories she’d buried so deep down it would take a backhoe to dig them up.

Fifteen years had passed since the arrest, or That Night, as Natalie thought of it.

Tension-filled phone calls to her mother over the years had devolved into total estrangement.

Patricia had left them on their own for several weeks after their dad had died when Natalie was ten, Lynn thirteen, and Jake fourteen because she needed to “work through things.” Natalie realized now that her mother had been having some kind of breakdown, but kid Natalie had only known that her mother had gone away, Lynn was the one making mac and cheese for dinner, and Jake was making sure they all got home safely from school.

It had been a long time since she last wished things had been different with Jake and Lynn. What life would have been like if she hadn’t called the police that night and they hadn’t gone to prison.

This conversation was a newborn chick, wet and unsteady and awkward.

she could forgive the obliviousness of teenage boys. She’d watched Jake work his way through every stage of stupidity, so she knew.

She had that nasty glint in her eye that was a telltale sign that she was high. It was one of the reasons Natalie hated when Lynn and Jake did drugs. It turned them into ogres.

It was actually a fitting profession for Lynn, who had always been so dark that she could have been molded from the fibers of demons.

there was something to be said about your childhood home, especially if the early memories were warm and good.

For the first time in years, she allowed herself to feel grief over the losses she’d faced: her mother, the bond with her siblings, this house.

She was no stranger to sticking her foot in her mouth and was quick to forgive when it happened to others.

She missed him and couldn’t wait to see him. But she was terrified of what would happen.

So much time lost, so much unnecessary hurt.

You get to a certain point, and it doesn’t make sense to hold on to the hate.”

She could see it was an act, as though the robotic part of his brain had sifted through possible reactions and approved the one called look confused by her resistance.