The View from Prince Street by Mary Ellen Taylor

Inside the trunk were dozens of letters bound together with a faded red ribbon.”
    When I was younger, Amelia had been the energetic older aunt who had always been quick with a fun idea. She loved life. When I was six, she took me for a ride in her new convertible sports car along the George Washington Parkway. When I was ten, she hired a hot-air balloon and we drifted over the waters of the Potomac. And when I was nearly eighteen, in the dark days after my parents’ deaths and then the car accident, she allowed me to cry when no one else thought I had a right to my tears. When I was twenty, she dragged me to my first AA meeting and told me not to contact her ever again if I didn’t start working with the program.
    Aunt Amelia never shied from a challenge. A box of letters would have been irresistible. “How long before you doubled back and read the letters?”
    Eyes twinkled. “Three days. I had to wait for Mom and Dad to leave the house. I pulled the steps down and crept up the stairs.”
    â€œWhere was Dad during all this?” My father was seven years younger than Amelia and his older sister’s constant shadow until she moved out of the family home for college.
    â€œYour father was about five at the time. I was supposed to be watching him, and of course, when I put him in bed he did not sleep. He was always a terrible sleeper, much like you.”
    â€œI can picture it now. You’re in the attic and Dad is on the bottom rung of stairs threatening to tell.” I had loved my father, but he never failed to use information to his advantage. He could keep his own secrets but no one else’s. It was why I had never been able to really talk to him.
    â€œYour father sensed I was up to no good, and he took great joy in threatening to tell Mom that I was in the attic.” She glanced at her polished nails, her grin as devilish as a young schoolgirl. “I told him I’d tell Santa he’d been naughty. Santa would never again come to our house. His eyes grew as wide as saucers, but he tried to hold his ground and insist I was lying. But I wanted to see the letters so badly that I kept twisting the Santa threat until he burst into tears and ran to his room.”
    â€œAnd you read the letters.”
    â€œI snuck them to my room and read each and every one of them.” Her eyes glistened. “I discovered my adoptive mother was in love with a man named Jeffrey. The letters were dated several years before my parents met. Which made them all the more delicious.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    She opened her mouth to speak but hesitated and frowned. I recognized the expression. The words and ideas on the tip of her tongue flitted away, out of reach. “She married my father, so I suppose it did not end well for Mother and Jeffrey. I never really knew what happened to him until I found this book. He married another woman.”
    She fumbled with the frayed edge of her blanket and I could see her frustration. A woman who had prided herself on her quick wit and memory was losing both to a disease that took its time robbing the mind.
    I laid my hand over hers and then kissed the back of her hand. “Let’s look at the book and see if it will tell us what happened.”
    Worried eyes rose to mine, and for a blink, she searched my face, staring for the familiar. Slowly, she nodded. “It all must be in the book, shouldn’t it?”
    â€œIt must be, otherwise you wouldn’t have it.”
    I turned the first page to a picture of an infant girl dressed in awhite christening gown. A round button mouth curled into a wide grin and her little hands were splayed wide open. The photographer had caught her mid–belly laugh. Amelia had been a pretty baby, with wisps of lightly colored hair, which I guessed had been red. I had seen pictures of her as a young woman and her hair was a vibrant copper. As she aged and silver threatened to diminish the luster, she