All The Things We Didn’t Say
All families have secrets but what if your father was hiding a secret that was destroying him – and the rest of the family? An emotional story of family perfect for all fans of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.Tragedy came as if so often does: a teenage party, emotions running high, followed by a horrific car crash. A girl is left dead and a boy is forced to leave his home town, with a secret that he will carry with him forever…Years later, when Summer's mother disappears one summer, she is left with her father. Obsessed with an accident from years ago, he slowly descends into mental illness. And as he becomes more disorientated, he reveals small fragments of a secret that has been hidden since his youth, a secret that changes everything.Summer supports her father as much as she can but eventually realises that she has to escape. She finds refuge with her great-aunt, Stella. Feisty, fun-loving, and dying of cancer, Stella holds parts of the family secret. Slowly, things fall into place for Summer - or at least so she thinks…This is a story of the importance of family, of the damage a lie can do, and of how nothing is ever what it seems.
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All The Things We Didn’t Say
Sara Shepard
For my mother, Mindy Shepard
Table of Contents
Behind you was a poster for the DQ Butterscotch Sundae, and next to you were the gleaming, shuddering machines that dispensed the ice cream. Mark catapulted over the counter and gave you a big hug. ‘Here she is,’ he said, clapping his hands on your shoulders. You looked familiar. It was probably that I’d seen you around-at a picnic, in the halls at school, in the bleachers, in the aisles of Charles Kupka’s Drugs, The Finest Apothecary in Western Pennsylvania. You smiled at me and extended your hand, so formal. ‘Hello,’ you said. You smiled with all your teeth. ‘Hello,’ you said again.
You lived down the street from Mark. When you were little, you stole tomatoes from his garden. He used to chase you with a garden hoe with his eyes closed, chopping and chopping. But then, a month or so ago, Mark was up on a ladder, touching up the eaves of his house with white paint, and a bee came and scared him and he fell off. When he opened his eyes, flat on his back on the grass with the wind knocked out of him, the ladder still tilted against the roof, you were standing there with your wavy blonde hair and your milkmaid face and your wide, vine-ripened mouth. ‘I realized I loved her right then,’ Mark told me. He had been dying to introduce you to me for a while, but I’d been working so much that summer and had hardly been around.
I don’t know what made me go into Dairy Queen alone the next time, knowing what I knew. Mark had been my best friend since third grade, when we were both punished for sticking chewing gum to the underside of our desks. Perhaps it was because you said hello twice. Perhaps it was because Mark joked, that first time, ‘Now, don’t go stealing her away, Rich. She’s mine.’ I don’t know why he said that-I’d never stolen anything from Mark in my life. But maybe it got into my head, started whirring around. Maybe it was your dove-gray eyes, the way your hands were chapped and red from the Dairy Queen freezers, the way you swayed a little, winsome and uncertain, when you dispensed the ice cream into the pale yellow cone. The first time I went in alone, you pretended to forget my name. All you said was, ‘You’re Mark’s friend, right?’ The second time I came in, you said, ‘It’s freezing. All this snow, in October. You seriously want ice cream?’ The fifth you told me bits and pieces about your life.
You told me that you and Mark were secretly engaged. He wanted to get married as soon as you graduated-you were a grade behind us, so it was still a whole year away. You sat on the steel sink in Dairy Queen’s back room, surrounded by ice cream mix, boxes of rainbow sprinkles and glamour shots of the Buster Bar and the whorish, frothy DQ Float-Go ahead and splurge! Get it with Tab®! You told me how afraid you were, that you weren’t sure if Mark was the guy you were supposed to marry, how you thought love was supposed to hit you like a spark and you weren’t sure that had happened. ‘But I’m a good person,’ you always said when we pressed against the shelves of the walk-in, your lips tasting like caramel syrup. ‘I still do chores and everything.’ ‘It’s me, I’m the terrible one,’ was what I always said next. I wanted you to be blameless, pure. ‘He’s my best friend. I’m the bad person here.’ I touched the six freckles clustered together by your right eye, a constellation. I even gave the freckle-cluster a name, though I can’t remember it now. That’s probably a side-effect of what I’ve been through-so many precious memories have been yanked away forever.
The eighth time I told you everything about me. That winter, I took you to the old, abandoned drift mine, one of my favorite spots in all of Cobalt. We looked into the black, gaping mouth in the side of the hill to avoid staring at each other. You shivered and said coal mining had to be the scariest job in the world, trekking into those dark, uncertain caves. ‘I’m sure miners get used to it,’ I replied, but you shook your head and said you couldn’t see how. I told you that my father looked perfect on the outside, but he hardly ever ate dinner with us anymore. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had a conversation. It was always sports on TV, or long hours at work, or time spent at the new golf club closer to Pittsburgh. He wanted me to play golf, too-he got me a membership to the country club a few Christmases before. ‘Golf is a good skill for your future,’ he said gruffly, ignoring my lack of enthusiasm. ‘I’m grooming you for better things.’ The only thing I’d wanted that year was a set of encyclopedias, but my father said I could just use the encyclopedias at school. When new encyclopedias showed up on our doorstep a few weeks later, my father frowned, thinking it was a mistake. ‘It’s not,’ my mother said quickly. She’d gotten last year’s set at a discount from a door-to-door salesman, practically for free. When my father turned his back, she winked at me. I read those encyclopedias cover to cover, starting with A and ending with Z. I loved M; it was so thick. There were so many fascinating things in M.
