“Show me where you’re from and I’ll tell you who people think you are.”
From the T-shirt collection of Anna Collins
My parents’ house sat high above the rocky shore, but the windows in my old bedroom had been cracked open for fresh air, so I’d slept with the sound of the sea and woken up with the pale eastern light illuminating the familiar space.
I’d long since determined that I was a morning person. Growing up with an east-facing bedroom had probably been a major contributing factor to my tendency to rise with the sun. Colette’s room was on the west side of the house, and she had taken those night owl proclivities and turned them into a thriving social life – something people who are usually in bed by nine don’t have.
My dad had waited up the night before to make sure I made it home, so I doubted I’d see him for a few hours. I could hear mom in the kitchen, talking to her dogs. We’d always grown up with at least one dog in the house, but since Colette and I had moved out, mom had started fostering rescues for the local shelter. She said it was because our dad still traveled for work and she wanted the dogs for protection, but we knew it was for the company they gave her.
I pulled on yoga pants and one of my dad’s T-shirts and padded downstairs in bare feet with a handful of my clothes. “Good morning,” I said as I entered the kitchen. “Can I do laundry?”
“Good morning. Yes. Add it to the pile on the machine,” my mom said while measuring out dog food into dishes on the counter.
I counted five dogs seated around her waiting with expectant faces for their food dishes. Two or three of them had looked over at me when I entered, but at least two – a beagle I didn’t know and a black lab named Timmy – had eyes only for my mom.
“Help me with these, would you?” she asked, indicating two of the bowls.
I grabbed the bowls and followed her out to the sunroom that had been added onto the hundred-year-old house sometime in the fifties. With time it had become sort of a glorified mud room. Coats hung from hooks on the walls, and a line of boots and clogs stood sentry beneath them. A big orange construction bucket held umbrellas and walking sticks, and a stack of beach chairs leaned against one wall, with towels draped to dry over them.
“You can put those two over there for Conor and Lucas, the two corgis. They’re brothers and they share everything, even if they have to wrestle for it,” my mom said, indicating two handsome little corgis with wiggling tail stubs. She put bowls down for Timmy, the beagle, and a shepherd mix I vaguely remembered was called Maggie. “Come,” she held her hand out to me when all the dogs were eating, “let’s fill thermoses with coffee and take them down to the beach.”
At the word “beach,” Timmy looked up at mom and wagged his tail adoringly before finishing his food. She laughed and gave him a pat before heading back into the kitchen.
I got two thermos mugs out of the jumble of random coffee cups and promotional mugs mom saved from every convention my dad ever went to. He was a sales rep for several different building supply manufacturers, all the while living in a house that had been built before WWI and was in its original condition. She filled the mugs with fresh coffee from the pot, and I had just pulled on my dad’s sweater when the doorbell rang.
All five dogs swarmed to the front door, barking like a pack of rabid hunting hounds, while Mom waded through them to open it. I’d started the laundry and gone back into the sunroom for a pair of clogs when Mom finally returned from the front. “Anna, there’s someone here to see you,” she said with a smile in her voice.
I looked up just as Darius entered the kitchen, herded there by several dogs and holding a large FedEx box. “You can just set that on the counter over there,” Mom told him as she pulled a knife from the butcher block.
I stared at the scene in shock. “What are you doing here?” I gasped to Darius, somehow afraid my mom had pulled the knife on him. But then she got busy cutting into the FedEx box, and I could refocus my shock on its intended recipient, who looked far too handsome to be standing in the kitchen of my childhood home looking at yoga-pants-and-dad-sweater-wearing me.
“I actually came to talk to your mum.”
Oh, well that’s better, my brain sneered.
“Did you bring that?” I nodded toward the FedEx box.
“No, it was sitting outside the door when I drove up,” he said.
I leaned back against the kitchen counter with my arms folded tightly across my chest and suddenly became aware of what my body language must be saying when he stepped closer to me and said quietly, “I’m not stalking you, Anna. I really did just come here to speak to your mum about her time at the Gardner Museum.” His eyes searched mine.
“Why?” Why did he come here? Why talk to mom? What did he see in my eyes? “What could Mom’s internship possibly have to do with the Gardner heist or the Manet?” I murmured. Or even The Sisters painting, my mind whispered.
“Oh!”
I tore my gaze away from his, and we both turned to see what had startled my mom. The cardboard box and a wad of bubble wrap lay discarded on the counter, and in her hands she held an ornately carved wood framed painting. Her eyes filled with tears as she turned it to show us.
“I never thought I’d see this again. My sister and I painted each other for a class we were taking at MassArt, but it was stolen from the annex at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on the night of the heist.”