Teresa looked at Annie.
Annie spoke for the first time. Her voice was soft and a little hoarse, like she’d been crying all night too.
“She found the pictures,” she said.
“What pictures?”
“Of me. My mom gave him one every year. On my birthday. He kept them.” She wiped her nose on the sleeve of the blue cardigan. Michael’s cardigan. “Lily said she found them in a box in your garage. In August. She was looking for old fabric. There were pictures of me at every age. He wrote on the back of each one. Annie, 4. Annie, 7. Annie, 12.“
The shoebox on Lily’s desk. The one I’d turned off the lamp next to.
“She recognized me,” Annie said. “From school. She’d seen me in the hall. She said she sat in your garage and looked at the pictures for like three hours.”
August. That was two months ago.
Two months.
I tried to think back to August. Lily had been quiet. I’d thought it was because school was about to start. I remembered her coming in from the garage one night with dust on her jeans and her eyes red. I’d asked if she was okay. She said, “Allergies.”
I’d believed her.
“She didn’t tell me anything at first,” Annie said. “She just started… being around. Sitting near me at lunch. Saying hi. I thought she felt sorry for me. Everybody feels sorry for me or makes fun of me. There’s no in-between.” She laughed weakly. “Then she found out about the concert. And she asked me what size I wore. I thought she was being weird.”
“And yesterday,” I said.
“Yesterday she brought me the dress before first period.” Annie’s face crumpled. “It was so beautiful. Nobody’s ever made me anything. I put it on in the bathroom, and it fit perfect, and I just stood there and cried. And she was so happy. She was jumping up and down.”
“Then what happened?”
Annie looked at her hands.
“Then I found the box. In the bag. Under the sweater.” She touched the cardigan. “I opened it in the bathroom. And I read the note.”
She stopped. Teresa squeezed her hand.
“Tell her, baby,” Teresa said. “It’s okay.”
Annie took a breath.
“I went back out to the hall,” she said, “and I threw the box at her.”
I didn’t move. I was holding my breath.
“I didn’t know,” Annie said, and now she was crying hard. “I swear. I didn’t know Uncle Mike was my dad. My mom never told me. I thought my dad was some guy who left before I was born. That’s what she always said.”
Teresa closed her eyes.
“So I read that note,” Annie said, “and I thought Lily was making it up. I thought it was some kind of joke. Like, a really mean joke. Like, rich girl makes the poor girl a dress and then pretends to be her sister so everybody can laugh.”
“We’re not rich,” I said faintly.
“You’re richer than us,” Annie said. Not angrily. Just stating it. “You had a house. You had him.”
I didn’t argue.
“I yelled at her,” Annie said. “In front of everybody. The whole hall. Trevor and his friends and everybody. I said she was a liar. I said… I said ‘you think because your dad’s dead you can just give me some fake dad?’ And I said she could keep her stupid dress. I took it off right there in the bathroom and threw it at her and walked out in my gym clothes.”
She covered her face.
“And Trevor started laughing. And he said, ‘Goodwill doesn’t even want your hand-me-downs, Lily.’ And everybody laughed at her. At her. Because of me.”
I thought of Lily coming up the stairs with her swollen eyes.
Please, Mom. Leave it.
