Worth the Read by Diana Cockrell

Author:Diana Cockrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Diana Cockrell
Published: 2022-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

I

don’t remember much about that supper, sitting at the table with my great-great-great-great-grandmother. She was in the peak of youth, laughing and chatting, with vibrant blue eyes, fulfilling her self-appointed role as Tori's Helpful Guide to Colonial Food (we had some kind of fish, maybe cod). Oddly enough she was at the same time two hundred and fifty years older and just about the same age as me.

My mind was in a tailspin. I had told Mom that perhaps it was just a coincidence. There were, after all, lots of Wells family lines, and if we shared that same last name, it didn’t automatically follow that we were related to them. But Mom had offered a tattered smile and replied that she didn’t think “coincidence” was an option open to us.

I didn’t think so either. I kept thinking of their eyes, the very same steely blue as mine; the eerie way Sam Adams reminded me of my dad; the uncanny fact that politics seemed to run in the family.

Once or twice during that meal, Hannah looked at me quizzically and tried to draw me into the conversation. But armed with new information, all I could see when I looked at her was a white-haired, grizzled old woman working on her knitting patterns. And one should demonstrate a certain amount of respect and restraint with one's ancient multi-great grandmother.

Samuel wasn’t there. I suspected he was with his father, who had disappeared again, called back out into the wet night to consult secretly about the next day's Tea Party. He really was hardly ever home.

But Mrs. Adams was there, seated serenely at the head of the table, as patient and tranquil as ever. According to Mom, somewhere in this town, she had a much younger brother who slipped in occasionally to pay her a visit, doffing his perky three-cornered hat and one day noticing Hannah for the first time. Their eyes would meet.

And 250 years later, I was born.

I lay in bed beside Mom that night, listening to the crackling of the fire and trying to figure out the snarled family tree of the Wells clan. It was the kind of thing you did at family reunions, even if the reunion was a ghostly affair involving members that hadn’t yet been born.

Hannah married Thomas Wells, her stepmother's younger brother. Weird, but whatever. She would have children and eventually grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and I was one of them.

Samuel would be a kind and affectionate uncle to those small fry, and he was, in fact, right now my great-great-great-great…granduncle? Was that even a thing?

Maybe deep down I had known this all along. I had been in Boston only twenty-eight hours, and yet a camaraderie had sprung up among us, an understanding borne of more than just similarity in age.

However, I couldn’t deny there was something different about these colonial people, Samuel included, something I couldn’t quite name. Something more…real. I wondered if I’d ever find anyone back home like them. Minus the hats, of course.

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