Page 80 of SEAL'S Baby Surprise
“Really?” Charlie asks, his eyes getting big.
“Really,” Uncle Richard says. “Son, this is a real serious case of do as I say and not as I did. Your Uncle Austin and I, and our roomies could cut a real swath through town on Saturday nights. It’s a wonder we didn’t get into worse trouble than we did.”
“I do recall having to pay for broken property several times,” Andrea says.
“And I had to bail them out a couple of times,” Caleb adds. “But the real truth is, they never got into all that much. And once Richard and Austin got on the sports team, they cleaned up their act considerably.”
“Had to,” my dad says. “Otherwise, we’d have gotten kicked off the team. It was probably our saving grace.”
“So what are we looking for?” Mama Lee asks.
“The family tree our dad put together,” Uncle Richard says. “According to the email I got from Andrew, there’s something in it that we need to check on. As far as I know, our family records start when we got off the boat in New York.”
“So we’ve got a million boxes to go through, and no real idea what we’re looking for?” Mama Lee says, looking at the mountain of packing cartons.
“That’s about the size of it,” Uncle Richard says.
“It’s not quite that bad,” Andrea says. “We know that all those materials were in your father’s office when we packed it up. So we shouldn’t need to go through everything.”
The parental units (I won’t call them adults or grown-ups—immaturity reigns with that bunch) find a table and start unpacking boxes.
Most of the stuff is bound ledger sheets. Some of it is old computer disks. Some of them are even, get this now, antique floppy disks. And when they say “floppy” they mean floppy! How could anyone figure you could permanently store anything on those?
The younger kids and I get bored with all the dusty papers and go off to see if we can find anything more interesting.
There’s old dressers, with drawers filled with costume jewelry. One big trunk contains toys that you can wind up with a key.
I find a set of living room furniture where the chairs and tables make a kind of little alcove. I’m tired of my sibs and cousins, so I slide into it. It is dim and a little dusty in there. But it is quiet. I can hear the other kids rampaging around.
A coffee table is sort of standing on end in it. There’s a drawer in the table that should have been long and flat. but with the table standing up, it makes more like one of those pantry drawer things where you can pull it out and find all the spices.
I tug on the drawer. It slides right out, and inside it is a hand-tooled photo album, kind of like the ones Aunt Kandis uses to keep family pictures in.
I open it up. It’s got some really old photographs in the front. Then, farther over it has pictures of Grandma and Grandpa Lane. I recognize them from the framed pictures Uncle Richard has in his house.
I turn the page, and there are pictures of Uncle Richard, Uncle Andrew, and Mama Lee. But there’s also a package of pictures that aren’t in the album. I open up the package.
There’s a picture of a beautiful, dark-skinned woman. She’s laughing at the camera, her brown eyes are wide with long eye-lashes, her eyebrows are natural, with a beautiful arch. She has a dimple in one cheek.
Her hair is covered by a headdress that looks a lot like the one on the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. She’s standing beside a super young version of Grandpa Lane.
A little later on, there’s a picture of a boy. He’s lighter skinned than the lady, but he still has brown eyes. Somehow, he looks kind of like Grandpa Lane.
There’s a thin packet of letters. Could this be what they are looking for?
I close everything thing back up, then look around. The cousins and my sibs are all gathered around a game board. Looks like they foundChutes and Ladders, or something like it.
I ease out of my hiding place, and take my booty over to Mama Lee. “Momly,” I say, “Is this what everyone is looking for?”
She takes it in her hands, and opens it up. “I’m not sure,” she says. “But it certainly is a treasure.”
She looks at the pictures of people wearing funny clothes, then she gets to Grandpa and Grandma Lane. She turns the page, sees the envelope, and slides the pictures out.
Then she pulls out something I had not seen before. It looks like a marriage certificate, then a birth certificate for a Leland Eugene Lane. “Richard!” she calls out. “Come take a look at this!”
Uncle Richard comes over. He frowns at the picture of the beautiful woman and Grandpa Lane standing together.
He shuffles through more of the photographs. Then he carefully opens the bundle of letters, and slowly reads through each one of them. Then he pulls out one last piece of paper.
