A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Everyday is the same at the Phillips household, nothing ever changes. You wake up, get dressed, feed the chickens, eat and go to school. Im only 6 years old, and my mother Tina always tells me that as a girl I have to learn how to take care of everything, so that when she dies nothing will go wrong. When I woke up this morning my mother told me that I was not going to school, she said we had some important business to take care of. My mother didn’t seem herself, it looked as if she had been up all night crying, she refused to tell me anything.

My clothes were already hanging on my door when I woke up, they were special clothes the type of clothes we only wear on Sundays. I got cleaned and walked downstairs, my brothers Billy and Bob were in suits, I couldn’t believe it. They didn’t look very happy, I was very curious to see what my mother had planned for us today. When I walked to the kitchen I noticed that my grandmother was not in her usual spot, knitting, she was missing. I went towards my mother who was fixing her hair, she looked pretty too. I was walking outside when I noticed that our horse Hairy was tied to a carriage, we have had Hairy for over 4 years and we never used him for transportation, we looked at him as family.

It didn’t bother me that my father was missing, he was always out fishing trying to get our dinner for the day, but I noticed that he left his fishing poles in the shack. “Brenda!” yelled my mother. I walked back inside and she had my coat in hand, said we needed to bundle up because we were going to be doing a lot of walking. My mother said she would have let us go to school but the risks were to high, she didn’t tell me what she ment by risks. I was starting to think that my mother was hiding something from my brothers and I.

We got into the carriage, there was a mysterious man sitting up front managing the ropes. My mother leaned up to the mans ear and whispered something. The man and my mother both looked at my younger brother Billy and shared a laugh. Billy was the weird kid of the family, he had blondish hair, and the tiniest nose in the world. My mother said he looked just like my grandfather when he was a baby. When the carriage stopped we were in front of our towns court house, my mother told us to stay in the carriage while her and the man went to the court house. She rushed into the house and soon disappeared into the crowd.

They were back in about 30 minutes, and they seemed happy, and my mother had an envelope in her hand. She was shaking it and laughing, she was still to far away for me to hear what she was telling the man. When they got into the carriage, they looked at my brother again and smiled. Me and my other brother, Bob looked at eachother confused, not knowing what was going on.

We were back home and there were boxes outside. We all walked into the house, the man came along with us and he sat down at the dinner table. We all sat down, Mom had made us an apple pie. She said she and the man had something important to tell us, she took the mans hand and said that Our father had left because he had found something out, she told us that this man that was sitting here with us was Bobs biological father. We were shocked and I started crying, he left the dinner table and said he was going to get his boxes because he was moving in. We were left alone sitting by the dinner table, with our new father.