Silent Fall

looking at her. Maybe she did the same thing. It was easier to keep the distance between them.
    Sam gently urged Megan out of his lap and rose to his feet. "I'll call Nina's. The usual?"
    Why was it always the simple words, the familiar memories that hurt the most?
    "The usual," she agreed.
    Sam walked over to the desk and picked up the phone. While he dialed the number for the pizza parlor, Megan handed Alli the high school yearbook.
    "Daddy showed me your picture," Megan said. "You were really pretty, Mommy."
    Alli stared down at her sophomore photograph. She'd been trying to grow her hair out, to be more like Tessa. But where her sister's thick, wavy blond hair grew like a weed, Alli's own copper-colored hair never quite made it past her shoulders, and was so thin and fine it almost seemed to disappear.
    Once, a very long time ago, Sam had told her that her hair was like silk, and she'd thought, foolishly of course, that he'd found something about her that he liked better than Tessa.
    Alli slammed the book shut. Megan looked at her in surprise.
    "What's wrong, Mommy?"
    "Nothing." She forced a smile on her face. "What did you do today?"
    "We waxed the hot rod."
    "Of course," Alli said. Because next to his business, waxing his 1955 red Thunderbird was Sam's favorite pastime. She wouldn't have minded so much if the damn car hadn't been just another reminder of Sam and Tessa. In her mind's eye she could still see the two of them tooling around town in it.
    "Do you want to see it?" Megan asked.
    "The car?" Alli asked in confusion.
    "No, the thing I made you. Weren't you listening, Mommy?"
    "I'd love to, honey."
    "I'll get it." Megan ran out of the room, and Alli walked over to the bookcase and stuck the yearbook in a dark corner where she hoped it wouldn't be discovered for another decade.
    As her gaze traveled around the familiar room, she realized that Sam had done some cleaning, made some changes since he'd moved back into his family home and his parents had retired to Arizona. His father's pipe no longer sat in the ashtray on the desk. The three-foot-high pile of fishing magazines had been tossed in a large open box along with some other knickknacks -- obviously destined for storage.
    The changes made her feel uncomfortable. The thought that Sam was finally accepting that this was his home bothered her more than she cared to admit. That he was changing the house to fit him as a man instead of a child was odd, too. This house had been a part of her own childhood, because she'd grown up next door.
    When she was nine, and Tessa eleven, they'd lost their parents in a car crash and come to live with their grandmother, Phoebe MacGuire. They'd traveled between houses as kids do, and Alli had come to know this one almost as well as her own. Although she had usually been the one tagging behind, trying to catch up to Sam and Tessa, and somehow the door always seemed to slam in her face.
    Sam hung up the phone. "The pizza will be here in fifteen minutes."
    She nodded. "Great. So, how did the weekend go?"
    "Fine."
    "Megan starts summer school tomorrow. We'll have to redo our visitation schedule."
    "I hate that word," he said with a fierceness that startled her. "Megan is my daughter. We should all be living together, not visiting each other."
    Alli didn't know what to say. So much for thinking that Sam had accepted things. "I'm sorry; that was the wrong word to use. You know you can see Megan as often as you want, Sam. I would never keep you apart."
    "Then why ask for a divorce? Why break up our family? Why the hell do you have to be so selfish, Alli?"
    His words hit her like bullets, each one hurting more than the last, and her only defense was to hit back.
    "Don't blame it all on me, Sam. I wasn't the only one who wanted out, just the one who had the guts to ask."
    "You don't know what you're talking about."
    "The hell I don't," she said sharply. "When I found that box of clippings and photographs of Tessa, I felt like I'd just stumbled upon you in bed with another woman."
    "I was never unfaithful to you."
    "Maybe not in body, but in mind you certainly were. How do you think it feels to know the man who is touching you is thinking about someone else?" Her voice shook with the depth of her pain. She could still see herself sneaking into Sam's office to surprise him with an intimate anniversary dinner, only to find a box of Tessa's photos hidden away in the bottom drawer of his desk. She'd been looking for the corkscrew he