Tim's mother is too young to die, but she dies anyway--in a video that goes viral. Tim scrambles to hold his life together, but the person who keeps him on his feet turns out to be his half-sister, a fiesty girl who has no idea they're related, but...
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On the side of Lee's Hardware are the wooden stairs leading up to the door. It's a little intimidating, but I guess it's necessary to separate the work from the homelife. I push my headphones backwards to hang around my neck before I knock on the door. From Heather's, I walked all the way over here reassessing my music choices for the afternoon.
Vivian comes to the door swinging it wide open, the hesitance I heard over the phone really evident on her face now. I'm untrustworthy. There's plenty of reasons for her not to trust me.
The suite above Lee's Hardware is larger than I expected. Considering there has to be at least as much floor space above as there is in the store itself, I should have had a pretty good idea, but it still surprises me. Though the building front is aging, paint flaking off the hammer and saw and stucco stained and weathered from too many days of, well, weather, the apartment feels modern. The floors are laminate and match the cherry cabinets in the kitchen. The vibe is vaguely Asian, but in ways that almost aren't obvious. The stylized screen separator between the entry way and the living room clearly has influences, but maybe it's the straight lines everywhere, horizontal and vertical that give it the edge.
There's a row of Vivian's school photos in the living room, a perfect progression into perfection. Each picture she gets one step closer to having a flawless look. If only flawless was synonymous with endearing. The little quirky details like the duck hair clips from what must be grade three or four fade away into impeccable picture day curls.
Almost everything in the room is a rich, dark colour that's warm and inviting, but a different warm and inviting than mine and Mom's brown farm print sofa and thick shag carpet.
"So here it is." Vivian makes a sweeping gesture with both arms.
"Not a lot of family photos," I note.
"We weren't much of a family." Vivian's shoulders slide up and down in sync with her heavy sigh. "My mom wanted to do a lot of other things before having children. And then I came along."
Words drop like stones into me, rippling out into feelings. If there was one thing I never felt, it was unwanted. Motherhood was something that left space for choosing. Usually, any choices are made sometime between conception and birth, and yet here was Lily Winstead choosing sixteen years later to recant her earlier decision for motherhood.
