Unbreathed Memories by Marcia Talley

wondered if they were worrying about their mother or had simply run out of gas. By the time we reached the spot where the road forks left to Providence and right to the Naval Academy golf course, Sean and Dylan had fallen asleep with chocolate on their lips and the bag of groceries sandwiched between them.
    I pulled into the drive behind my father’s black Lincoln and set the brake with relief. Paul’s blue Volvo was parked on the street in front of the house next door. “We’re here, sports fans!” I reached back to unbuckle Julie, stepped out onto the driveway, then pushed my seat forward so the kids could get out. As Sean started to run off, I grabbed him by the hood of his jacket. “Not so fast, big fella. Carry the bag for me, will you?”
    He wrapped thin arms around the bag in a bear hug and plodded up the walk. “Help, Aunt Hannah! I can’t see!”
    I flipped down the automatic door lock and smiled after my nephew, as he staggered with slow, exaggerated Frankenstein steps up the walk, acting for all the world as if the bag weighed fifty tons. How could someone as screwed up as my sister Georgina have managed to raise such sweet kids? Oh, Lord! What if she had killed her therapist? What if she went to jail? I couldn’t imagine Scott handling the kids. Especially Julie. Inside that clever head of hers wheels were turning, measuring, weighing, taking everything in. And that defiant littlechin, just like our Emily. At least Emily had turned out all right—eventually—although there had been times when she was in high school when I would gladly have strangled her. I shuddered, remembering Dr. Sturges’s distorted face. Not nice, Hannah. You shouldn’t joke about stuff like that .
    I stepped through the door the kids had left open. Amid stacks of packing boxes still piled in the entrance hall, Paul greeted me with a hug and a soft kiss, his lips lingering on mine just long enough that I began to forget where I was and what brought me here. “Hold that thought,” I whispered against his ear. “Right now I have to cook up a few pizzas for lunch. Want some?”
    “Pepperoni, no mushrooms?” Paul asked, hopefully.
    “Pepperoni, no mushrooms.”
    Paul touched my lips with his index finger. “I love it when you sweet-talk me like that.” A long, satisfying minute later, he followed me into the kitchen where Sean had abandoned the grocery sack, leaning crookedly against the refrigerator door.
    Paul tore open the pizza boxes while I fiddled with the high-tech dials and buttons on Mother’s new stove, trying to get the oven to turn on. “Where are Mom and Dad?” I asked.
    “In the living room. Watching TV. They were waiting for the news, at least that’s what they were doing until the recent invasion of adoring rug rats.”
    I rummaged through the cabinets, looking for something to bake the pizzas on. “What a mess! How are they taking this?”
    “Neither one’s saying much. Could be shock, I suppose. Your dad’s wearing a hole in the carpet with his pacing while your mother’s keeping a stiff upper lip. She’s confident it will all turn out to be a colossal mistake.”
    I found the cookie sheets—Mother had unpacked them, after all—and Paul slid the rock-hard pizzas onto them. While we waited for them to bake, I quietly brought Paul up to speed on the events of the past twenty-four hours and my role in them. I was relieved when he hugged me and told me that he thought I had done the right thing by telling the officers the truth.
    After pizza and Coca-Cola, consumed around the big coffee table in the living room, talking of everything else but, the children entertained us with a corrupted version of Monopoly. Even though they made up their own rules, which the boys kept changing to benefit themselves, it was Julie, I noticed with satisfaction, who ended up owning all the railroads, with hotels on both Boardwalk and Park Place. Paul eventually settled the kids in the basement recreation room with a