I was eight.
When I was ten, he married Cheryl. She wasn’t cruel to me, and in some ways that made it harder to explain to anyone. She was just indifferent. I was leftover furniture from a life she had no interest in. She smiled at me the way you smile at a coworker’s kid at the company picnic, quick and polite, and then she turned back to whatever actually mattered to her.
By the time I was twelve, I was spending most weekends with my Aunt Diane.
Diane was my mom’s older sister. She lived about an hour away in a small house, and she looked after the old lake property that had been in my mother’s family for decades. She never married and never had children, and she treated me like I was both her son and her best friend. She taught me to cook eggs without breaking the yolks. She sat with me over pre-algebra until it finally made sense. She asked about my day and then actually listened to the answer, which I wasn’t used to.
