4 Family Matters

Leonard’s journey back to his family hadn’t been a straight line. It zigged through guilt, zagged through self-doubt, and took a detour into the absurd when he acquired Turkules—a turkey with a personality as peculiar as Leonard’s.

Turkules wasn’t like other turkeys. He had quirks, the kind that made Leonard wonder if the universe had custom-built him to fit into his life.

For one, Turkules despised disorder. If Leonard left papers on the floor, Turkules would scoop them up with his beak and deposit them on the nearest counter or table. This turned out to be oddly helpful, especially when Leonard thought he’d lost the schematics for a new project.

“If only you could sort my taxes,” Leonard muttered one morning as Turkules strutted proudly with a sticky note in his beak.

Turkules also had a knack for finding missing socks. Leonard wasn’t sure if the turkey enjoyed the chase or just hated incomplete pairs, but every morning, Turkules would drop a mismatched sock on Leonard’s bed with a triumphant squawk.

After months of anonymous emails with his internet friend—a brilliant robotics enthusiast who reminded Leonard of himself in his tinkering youth—he couldn’t keep the secret any longer. She deserved to know.

He finally sent the email:

Subject: Family Matters

Lucy, I owe you an explanation. I’m not just some random old guy who knows his way around a circuit board. I’m your uncle—the bad one who fought with your mom over dry turkey and never called again. I’ve spent years thinking it was too late to fix things. But meeting you, even virtually, has made me want to try.

Lucy’s reply came quickly:

Subject: Seriously?

Uncle Leonard?

I can’t decide if I should be mad or impressed. You’ve been helping me with robotics, and all this time, you knew me? Mom talks a lot about her childhood, and you come up a lot.

Leonard was surprised. Janet talked about him?

Her email continued:

I’ll give you Mom’s number—she’s wondered what became of you and worried sometimes if you were OK. She’s not very tech-savvy and assumes that’s why communication hasn’t been great between you two. I know we’ve been distant. I’m sorry about that. It’s just how we are. We’re trying to change that, though.

Leonard rehearsed for hours, pacing the cramped RV with Turkules occasionally squawking in judgment. Finally, he dialed Janet’s number.

“Hello?” Janet’s voice was sharper than he remembered.

“It’s me,” Leonard said, his voice cracking slightly. “Before you hang up, I want you to know—I’ve got a turkey.”

Janet was silent for a moment. “A turkey?”

“Yeah. He’s house-trained. Mostly.”

Janet chuckled. “That’s… unexpected. Why are you calling, Leonard?”

“I, uh… wanted to apologize. For Thanksgiving. 2003. The fight over the dry turkey.”

Janet laughed again, a little harder this time. “I don’t even remember that fight. I forgot why I was mad in the middle of explaining why I was mad.”

Leonard blinked. “So why haven’t we talked? Did you think I was mad?”

“Are you mad?” Janet asked, her tone genuinely curious.

“No,” Leonard said, flustered. “I just assumed—never mind. I’ll explain when I get there.”

Leonard parked the RV in Janet’s driveway, Turkules perched proudly on the dashboard. Lucy was waiting on the porch, arms crossed but smiling.

“Seriously?” she said, pointing at the turkey.

“What? He’s supposed to be an apology,” Leonard replied.

“For what?” Lucy asked, her brow furrowed.

“For the fight. For not calling for two decades. For… I don’t know, existing badly.”

Lucy shrugged. “We didn’t call either. Communication is a two-way street.”

As they sat in the RV, sipping coffee, the conversation stayed light at first. They talked about Lucy’s robotics projects, Janet’s garden, and Leonard’s RV adventures. But Leonard noticed something in Janet’s voice—an edge of guilt whenever she mentioned “the divorce.”

“You know,” Leonard said, leaning back in his chair, “I’ve got a story for you.”

He called over Wilson, his Roomba-turned-cassette-player, and popped in one of his friend’s tapes.

The crackling voice on the tape told the story of an eccentric, traumatized woman named Liana who, after her divorce, had beaten herself up so badly with guilt that she nearly gave her three kids up for adoption.

But the day she planned to meet with a caseworker, the police knocked on her door. They’d found the body of an 11-year-old buried in a house she’d been foreclosed on a year prior. The body had been buried six years earlier, long before she’d moved in, but the horror of the discovery shook her deeply. It could have been her child.

Instead of giving up, Liana found new strength. She kept her kids and turned a brief stint of homelessness into a grand adventure, convincing them they were on a camping trip. Years later, her eldest child created a business taking disadvantaged children on life-changing adventures.

“Even when she thought she’d failed them,” the voice on the tape concluded, “she found a way to give them a life worth living. And in the end, it wasn’t her failures they remembered. It was the love she poured into every day.”

Janet’s face tightened as the tape ended. “You think I stopped running?” she asked, her voice quiet but sharp.

“No,” Leonard said. “But I think you blame yourself for having to run in the first place.”

Janet looked away, gripping her coffee cup. After a long silence, she said, “Mom probably told you I ran away. But I didn’t. I had to leave. After what he did to Adam… I couldn’t stay. I prayed Adam wouldn’t remember, but I couldn’t risk it getting worse.”

Leonard felt his chest tighten. “Does Lucy know?”

“She was there,” Janet said simply. “She saw it. She suffered it. But we got out. That’s what matters.”

As Leonard drove back to his RV that evening, Turkules hopping around the dashboard, he couldn’t stop thinking about Janet’s words.

He’d always assumed the rift in their family was about petty fights and bad communication. He hadn’t known the depth of what Janet had endured—or how much guilt she still carried.

Maybe, he thought, it was time to stop assuming. Time to start listening.

And maybe, just maybe, the stories we tell—bizarre, profound, and unexpected—are how we make sense of a world that rarely makes sense on its own.