October Rain (Patreon)

My mother's aunt Sofia came to pick me up in a station wagon, a thing like a cross between a minivan and a car. I didn't know her, and I didn't even know mom had an aunt until the police told me she would be coming.

I waited in the Pueblo, Colorado hospital reception area, sitting with the police matron, trying not to think too much. I saw through the wide hospital windows as someone parked the big car in the white loading zone. The dominant color was brown with a cream accent panel that started in front of the doors and continued to the tail lights. It looked ancient but in good shape.

I watched her get out of the odd vehicle, and I wondered if it might be the woman I had been told to wait for. The rain had stopped for a bit, but she reached back in for her umbrella and carried it with her to the front of the building.

She came in through the electric doors, and I knew right away it must be her. Tall, like my mom, and those same sloping shoulders that mom said came from the Swedish ancestors on her mother's side. Aunt Sofia was my mother's older half-sister, almost twenty years older.

Must have been from the Swedish half, I thought. Anything not to think about why I was being picked up from the hospital by a relative I didn't know. I wondered if she had blue eyes, like mine, like mom's. Baltic blue, mom had called the color.

Aunt Sofia strode right up to the reception desk and announced, "I'm here to pick up Dale Carroll."

The matron, Officer Lindle who had told me to call her Meg, stood up and I stood up too. "I'm here," I heard myself say.

My aunt turned to look at me, and I saw she had those same blue eyes, deep blue but bright at the same time. She had the clear skin and high forehead and pale hair, too. She looked like an older version of my mother.

I didn't realize I was crying until she pulled me to her. "I'm here, sweetie," she said. "I'm here to take you home." She patted me on the back and hugged me.

* * *

We drove the four hundred miles back to her house in the big station wagon. We left right from the hospital, without even a stop at my parents' to pick anything up. "I went by there and got a few things, already," Aunt Sofia said.

I looked in the back, the deck behind the seats held several paper bags and a few suitcases and cardboard boxes. It didn't look like a lot of stuff, but I didn't ask any questions. If I needed something left behind, I could call back and have someone ship it to me.

"You're going to be living with me, now," said Aunt Sofia. "You must call me 'Moster,' it means 'aunt' in Swedish."

I smiled because it sounded funny. "Moster," I said. "Moster Sofia?" I asked.

She shook her head, "No, just 'Moster' will do. I'm the only aunt you have, aren't I?"

She had that accent a lot of people think of as Minnesota but is really from immigrant Scandinavians living wherever. Nebraska, for instance, where Moster Sofia and I were headed. Mom had had a trace of it, but it didn't mix with Dad's East Texas drawl or the local twang in Colorado, and I had no identifiable accent at all.

Thinking about their voices made me cry, and I turned my face away from Moster to watch the sky weep outside the window. The desert mountains needed the water.

She asked if I were hungry twice, once when we skirted around Denver and again after we crossed into Nebraska. I shook my head, not turning to look at her either time. Nothing more was said about eating, and we pulled into the drive at her farmhouse outside Gothenburg around ten o'clock.

The farmhouse, a white clapboard single-story main building in a cluster, had a steeply angled roof that overhung a porch on all sides. Most of the outbuildings were similar construction but without porches. The small red barn had a mansard roof for variety.

It had been raining in Pueblo and rained on us most of the trip, but the skies were clear over the house, and a fingernail moon shone low in the western sky. I hadn't seen it until I got out of the car because of clouds and it being behind us most of the way. It looked like the saddest, most beautiful moon there ever could be, a ragged remnant of a miniature planet no one ever lived on. I stood and stared at it for several minutes before Moster called me to help carry things in from the car.

We had said very little on the long drive and certainly nothing about what had happened to my parents. This turned out to be habitual with Sofia, she smiled and laughed but always with solemnity and few words. I would learn to do the same.