Oh, Dakota

9- Come In With The Rain

“Wait, if you’re staying home then you can hang out with us.” Levi suggested.

“No she can’t,” Owen protested.

“Why not?” I pouted, even though I had no intentions of hanging out with a bunch of guys on a Sunday night.

“Because most of these guys find you attractive and that makes me uncomfortable.” He informed me stubbornly. “So leave.”

“Okay,” I blushed at that totally incorrect piece of information. “I’m leaving, loser.”

“Wait, how’d you do yesterday? At the dance thing,” AJ, another one of the guys asked me. 

“We placed,” I sighed. 

“That’s good?” John wondered.

I laughed and then nodded. “Yeah, that’s good. We got like, third place out of fifteen teams.”

“Oh, so that’s really good.” Eddie chirped. “That’s cool.”

“Yeah, well I’m going to go now.” I sighed, turning around and leaving the room before shutting the door behind me. I went into my room and locked the door behind me, getting on my computer. I decided that since I didn’t have anything to do and Owen was busy, that I’d have some time to continue my search. 

I sat at my desk and Googled Annie Watkins. I grinned a little bit when I saw that there was only one Annie Watkins that lived in France- which is where Ancestry.com had told me that she lived, with the same birthday as my mom. That’s really the only thing I knew about her was her birthday and that’s only because my dad always gets really sad on that day and Derek eventually explained to me and Owen why that is. I know that Derek knows our mom’s name because he was thirteen when she left us. I think it’d be rather difficult to not know your mother’s name for thirteen whole years, but neither Derek nor Dad would ever tell me or Owen about her. Nothing, they would never even tell us her name, which is why I had to result to online searching. 

After I found the right Annie Watkins, I found out that she had her own art studio there in France which was amazing because that meant that she had a website. When I went to that website, I spent a great amount of time looking at her pieces of work. She was a painter mostly, but there was also some photography. It was all pretty simple but really, really good and she was obviously kind of a huge deal in France, because she had three galleries around the country and one being in Paris. 

After looking around the website, I was nearly in tears because for the first time in my life- I actually kind of felt a little bit close to my mother. To prove that it was the right woman, I read her biography thingy and it said that she was born in America- Alabama, to be exact, which is where we lived- and that she moved to Europe fifteen years ago, which is when our mom left. There weren’t any pictures of her but that would hardly help because I don’t know what my mom looks like because Dad and Derek took away all pictures of her before I was even old enough to know what had happened. 

When I go through all of the pages of the gallery, and then the biography, and some other stuff, I find a ‘contact me’ page and click on it. There, she has a phone number, fax, email, and P.O. box listed. Immediately, I decided to write her an email. I could have called her, but it would be really long distance and I mean, what would I even say over the phone? That would be so awkward and I just didn’t want to do that. 

I opened my Yahoo account and began writing the email. 

Dear Mother,

No, that sounds stupid. I backspaced and started again.

Hey Mom,

Way too casual- backspace and restart.

Dear Miss. Watkins,