He wished he was young enough to have fantasies? I thought. Corrine Dollanganger, a married women with four children, clung to them, and Christopher instinctively knew that without them, he and his brother and sisters wouldn’t survive. Maybe fantasies were as important to our lives as bread. I wondered now about my own.

Since reading the last page I had read in the diary, all my dreams rang with more hope than reality to me. Just recently, I had been imagining myself becoming a super doctor who not only treated patients but on the side performed miraculous research and found cures for cancer and other serious illnesses. Had I let everyone fill me with so much hot air about myself and my brilliance that I would explode with the shock of reality someday, maybe sooner than I thought?

“What made you want to get into construction? And don’t tell me your name again,” I said, taking my first bites of the French toast. As usual, it was better than any we had out at any restaurant, including Charley’s Diner. He had some secret in making it that he wouldn’t even tell me.

He stood there looking down at me. “You’re asking many more questions these days.”

“Maybe I need more answers as I get older, even though parents supposedly say their young children never stop asking questions.”

“That was you. You were born with question marks in your eyes.”

“I’m regressing,” I said, smiling. “This is so good, Dad.”

“I’m glad,” he said, and went to serve himself. “She makes really good jam,” he told me as he smeared some of it on his toast. “Everyone has some talent hidden in themselves. It just takes the right combination of events to bring it out, I guess.”

“You’re giving me an answer?”

He ate and looked past me for a few moments. Then he nodded. “The moment I met your mother, I became more ambitious. When you care a great deal about someone else besides yourself, you want to do more. Short-order cooking for a living was okay when I had no one but myself. I even put up with the dumb things my boss would do that made my work harder, but once I was with your mother, the world began to change, open up. She inspired me.” He paused and waved his right forefinger at me. “You wait until you find the right person to inspire you, Kristin. It makes all the difference when you have someone besides yourself to be responsible for, someone you love and who loves you.”

I nodded, but I wasn’t thinking about myself. I was thinking about Christopher and how all that was happening was forcing him to be more mature. He didn’t appear to me to be someone who ever pumped up balloons of false hope. He was simply too realistic about everything, even when he was much younger, but I had the sense that he knew the chances of him enjoying his youth were slipping away.

Was I really enjoying my youth? How much had my mother’s death taken from me? After my mother died, all I wanted to do was escape from sadness, and the quickest way to do it seemed to be just get older, almost overnight. All teenagers wanted to rush their lives along, wanted to be on their own faster. It drove us to resist rules, take chances, and lie to ourselves. How many times, in how many different ways, did my friends tell their parents, “You’re treating me like a child”? I never had to. My father sensed I was unfortunately taking on a seriousness born out of my mother’s unexpected passing. She had slipped away like a shadow helpless against the morning sun.

“What do you have on for today?” Dad asked.

“Nothing special. I’m going to Kane’s party tonight. You remember?”

“Driving yourself, or what?”

“Kane’s picking me up.”

He nodded. He looked thoughtful. I imagined he was thinking about me growing up so fast, but he surprised me. That wasn’t in his thoughts right now. “I didn’t want to mention this,” he said after he sipped his coffee. “Don’t want to encourage any thinking about it, but I know you’d want to know.”

“What?”

“When we were going through a shed to retrieve anything worth saving before we knocked it down, we found a child’s rocking horse. I’m guessing that it survived the first fire. Probably the way it fell under some metal, whatever.”

“Really. Where is it?”

“Todd took it to refurbish it. He thinks it might sell as an antique. Was it mentioned in the diary?”

For a moment, I couldn’t answer. Was he interested, or was he just testing to see what was in the diary? “Yes,” I said. “The first day after they had been brought there.”

He thought and nodded.

“Those children were told they had nothing after their father’s death, right? And that was why she brought them to Foxworth? Is that what he wrote in his diary?”

“Yes. Corrine threw herself on the mercy of her parents. She sounds to me like someone very helpless. She was babied and spoiled, even though her parents were supposedly very cruel. I know now that her husband spoiled her.”

He smirked and shook his head.

“What?”

“I don’t know what’s true or not true. We—your mother, I should say—understood differently.”

“Meaning what?”

“She wasn’t that desperate. She could have survived without her parents. But as I’ve been saying, who knows what really happened?” he added and rose.

Tags: V.C. Andrews
Source: readsnovelonline.net