Unturned Pages

"You learn to read the silences in a family. The problem is, sometimes they're written in a language you haven't been taught yet."

The car felt different on the drive home.

Not in any way I could have named or pointed to — the engine still hummed its familiar rhythm, the seats still carried that particular smell of ageing upholstery and accumulated family history, the winter sunlight still fell through the windows at its usual angle. Everything was exactly as it had always been.

And yet.

Dad's hands rested on the steering wheel with their customary steadiness. But something in his posture had shifted. A quality of attention that seemed directed inward rather than at the road ahead. His eyes tracked the traffic and the intersections as they always did, but there was a distance to his gaze — as if part of him were somewhere else entirely, navigating terrain I couldn't see.

Mum sat beside him in her usual configuration — handbag positioned on her lap, her posture carrying that particular Sunday stillness she adopted after church. But she kept glancing toward him in a way that felt weighted. Meaningful. Small movements of her head, barely perceptible unless you were watching for them.

Which, apparently, I was.

I pressed my cheek against the cool glass of the window and let my eyes drift across the passing landscape.

The winter light had that particular quality of early afternoon — bright but without warmth, the sun hanging in a sky that couldn't quite decide between blue and grey. Shadows stretched longer than they would in summer, the angle of the earth tilting us toward the shorter days.

Charles, occupying the seat beside me with his usual sprawl, had apparently noticed nothing unusual about our parents' behaviour. Or if he had, he'd chosen to address it by launching into full rhetorical flight on a topic that had clearly been festering since sacrament meeting.

"I'm just saying, there's a system," he declared, his voice carrying that particular intensity he reserved for grievances he'd been nursing. His hands moved as he spoke, punctuating his points with gestures that occasionally invaded my peripheral vision. "The gluten-free pieces go on the separate tray. The separate tray. That's literally the entire purpose of having a separate tray in the first place."

I continued watching the houses slide past.

"You can't just put them next to the normal ones and hope for the best," Charles continued, building momentum. "That's not how cross-contamination works. That's not how any of this works. There are protocols. There are reasons the protocols exist."

"I'm sure it was an oversight," Mum said, her tone carrying that particular patience she deployed when humouring complaints she didn't consider serious. But even as she spoke, her hand drifted toward the centre console — a small movement, almost unconscious. It rested there on the vinyl surface, fingers slightly curled, as if waiting for something.

Dad's hand moved to cover hers.

The gesture was brief. Subtle. The kind of thing that could have been accidental — a momentary contact, nothing more. But I saw it. Saw the way her fingers turned beneath his, the way they interlaced for just a moment before separating again.

They were communicating something. Acknowledging something. In a language built from decades of partnership, spoken in touches rather than words.

"An oversight that could send Sister Heinjus to the hospital," Charles was saying, oblivious to the silent conversation happening in the front seat. "She has coeliac disease, Mum. Actual, diagnosed coeliac disease. Not gluten sensitivity, not a preference — a genuine autoimmune condition. If she breaks out in hives again, or worse, it's literally going to be Reuben's fault."

"Reuben is fourteen," Mum said.

"Old enough to understand basic food safety. Old enough to read the very clear labels on the very clearly separated trays." Charles crossed his arms, the movement jostling me slightly as his elbow claimed territory on the seat between us. "Someone needs to talk to him. Before he accidentally poisons half the ward."

"I'm sure someone will gently correct him," Mum said.

"You mean me."

"If the Spirit so moves you."

Charles huffed — a sound of theatrical exasperation that somehow managed to convey both genuine frustration and the awareness that he was performing. His capacity for self-aware drama had always been one of his more endearing qualities, though I suspected he'd deny it if confronted directly.

"The Spirit is definitely moving me," he said. "The Spirit is moving me toward a strongly worded conversation about allergen management and the sacred responsibility of sacrament preparation."

"That sounds like a wonderful talk for youth conference," Dad said, his first contribution to the conversation. His voice was mild, carrying that particular dryness he deployed when gently deflating Charles's more elaborate pronouncements. "Perhaps you should propose it to the Young Men's presidency."

"Don't think I won't."

"I'm sure they'd be thrilled."

"They should be. This is important. This is literally life and death."

"It's bread," I said, without turning from the window.

"It's the principle, Jerome. The principle." Charles shifted in his seat, angling himself to better address his audience. "Today it's gluten-free bread. Tomorrow it's... I don't know. Nut allergies. Dairy contamination. The slippery slope of sacramental negligence."

"Sacramental negligence," Mum repeated, something that might have been amusement threading through her voice. "Is that a term?"

"It is now. I coined it."

"You should trademark it."

"I should. I really should." Charles nodded with exaggerated gravity. "Charles Michael Smith, defender of the immunocompromised, coiner of important ecclesiastical terminology."

In the front seat, Mum and Dad exchanged a glance. Just a flicker — a brief meeting of eyes that lasted perhaps half a second. But something passed between them in that moment. Something I couldn't read.

Were they amused by Charles? Probably. His performances usually earned at least a shared look of parental bemusement.

But this felt different. Layered. As if the amusement were resting on top of something else, something heavier, something they were carrying between them like a weight distributed across two sets of shoulders.

The car turned onto our street. The familiar houses slid past in their usual configuration — the place with the boat that had occupied the same spot in the driveway for at least three years, its hull faded by sun and neglect. The empty block on the corner, grass grown long enough to earn a council notice taped to the temporary fencing. The massive gum tree that dropped bark all over the footpath every summer, creating a carpet of curling strips that crunched underfoot.

And then our house. The same brick walls I'd known for years. The garden beds along the front fence, winter-sparse but tended. The front porch with its two chairs that nobody sat in except for Millie and me.

And the window where Millie was waiting.

I could see her already — ears pricked, tail a blur of motion behind the glass. She'd positioned herself in her usual spot, the one that gave her maximum visibility of the driveway approach. Her body was tense with that particular alertness she adopted when she knew we were coming, when the sound of the car engine had penetrated her doze and informed her that her abandonment was finally ending.

"Your daughter's upset," Mum said as Dad guided the car into the driveway.

The words were light, teasing — the familiar joke about Millie being my responsibility, my project, my dependent. But underneath them, I heard something else. A warmth. A gentleness. As if Mum were reaching for normality, anchoring herself in the familiar patterns of family banter.

The car came to a stop. The engine quieted. For a moment, we all sat in the particular stillness that follows arrival — that brief pause before the doors open and ordinary life resumes.

Then Charles was reaching for his seatbelt, and Dad was gathering his scriptures from the centre console, and Mum was adjusting her handbag, and the moment dissolved into movement and activity and the business of getting out of a car and going inside.

I reached for my own door handle, but not before I saw it one more time — that glance between my parents. That silent communication I couldn't decode.

Something was different.

I just didn't know what.

Millie's indignation was theatrical, bordering on operatic.

She met me at the door before I'd fully crossed the threshold, her body a study in barely contained emotion. The whimpering started first — high-pitched sounds of distress that fell somewhere between accusation and plea. Then came the spinning, tight circles of agitation that took her away from me and back again, as if she couldn't decide whether to celebrate my return or condemn my absence.

Her tail wagged furiously throughout, undercutting the tragedy she was attempting to perform. That was the thing about Millie — her joy always betrayed her, no matter how committed she was to the drama of the moment.

"I know," I said, dropping to my knees on the entrance hall floor. "I know. It's been terrible. Hours and hours of solitude. Nobody to keep you company. Nobody to appreciate your many gifts."

She pressed against me, all wriggling warmth and desperate affection. Her nose was cold against my neck — it always was, even in summer — and her fur carried that particular smell of dog who'd been sleeping somewhere she wasn't supposed to. Probably the couch.

I wrapped my arms around her and let her climb into my lap, sixty-odd pounds of border collie who had apparently decided she was a lapdog. Her body vibrated with the intensity of her relief, her tail thumping against the wall in a rhythm that echoed through the entrance hall.

"Did they abandon you, Mills?" I rubbed behind her ears, finding the spots that made her lean into my hand with shameless pleasure. "Did they leave you to wither in solitude? All alone in this big empty house, with nothing but your thoughts and your toys and your water bowl that I'm sure was completely full the entire time?"

She groaned in response — that particular sound she made when she was being thoroughly indulged. Her eyes half-closed, her head heavy against my chest, her earlier distress apparently forgotten now that the proper apologies were being offered.

"Nobody to talk to. Nobody to play with. Just the crushing weight of canine loneliness, pressing down on you hour after hour."

Charles stepped past us, nearly tripping over Millie's sprawled hind legs. "You know she can't actually understand what you're saying, right?"

"She understands tone. Tone is everything."

"Tone is what you use when you don't have actual content." He bent to unlace his shoes, performing the task with his usual combination of impatience and minimum efficiency. One shoe came off easily; the other required a struggle that seemed personally offensive to him. "She's been fine. She's always fine. She has a whole house to herself, which is more than any of us can say."

"She doesn't like being alone."

"She doesn't like missing out. There's a difference." The second shoe finally surrendered, and Charles kicked it toward the general vicinity of the shoe rack without bothering to check if it landed properly. "She has FOMO. Fear of missing out. It's a recognised condition."

"It's not a condition. It's separation anxiety."

"It's manipulation." He straightened, looking down at where Millie remained draped across my lap, her expression one of pure, blissful contentment. "And it's working, clearly. She's got you wrapped around her paw."

Millie opened one eye at the sound of his voice, assessed him briefly, then closed it again. Her dismissal was complete, her attention reserved entirely for the person currently providing the appropriate level of worship.

"She's fine," Mum said, moving past us toward the kitchen with her handbag and the folder of materials she'd taken to church. Her heels clicked against the tiles, then softened as she reached the hallway runner. "She had the whole house to herself. Some of us would call that a blessing."

"You sound like her landlord," Charles called after her. "Not her mum."

"I'm not her mum." Mum's voice drifted back from somewhere deeper in the house. "She's Jerome's dependent. I'm just the person who pays her food bills and cleans up after her accidents."

"She hasn't had an accident," I protested.

"Tell that to my begonias."

I looked down at Millie, who had the grace to appear entirely innocent. The begonia incident — which had occurred a solid eight months ago and involved circumstances that I still maintained were extenuating — had apparently earned a permanent place in family legend.

"The begonias were already dying," I said. "You said so yourself."

"They were struggling. There's a difference between struggling and being dug up by a dog who thought they were hiding something interesting."

Charles snorted, already heading toward his room. "She thought they were hiding treasure. Dog logic."

"Dog logic is still logic."

"Dog logic is chaos theory with fur." He disappeared around the corner, his voice trailing behind him. "I'm going to study. Maths test coming up. Very important. Please don't disturb me unless the house is on fire."

The thump of his door closing was followed almost immediately by the thump of music — bass-heavy and insistent, the particular soundtrack of Charles's alleged studying. The maths test, I suspected, would not be receiving his full attention.

I remained on the entrance hall floor for another moment, Millie warm and heavy against my legs. The house settled around us, absorbing the return of its inhabitants. Dad's footsteps moved toward the living room. Mum's voice murmured something from the kitchen — talking to herself, or possibly to the roast she'd left prepping in the fridge. The particular sounds of a family redistributing itself into domestic space.

"Come on," I said finally, shifting Millie off my lap with gentle firmness. "Let's get you some water. And maybe a proper greeting that doesn't involve blocking the doorway."

She rose with obvious reluctance, her body language suggesting that the entrance hall floor had been perfectly acceptable accommodation and my insistence on moving was a personal failing on my part. But she followed as I stood and made my way toward the laundry, her claws clicking against the tiles in that familiar rhythm.

Her water bowl was nearly empty — not neglected, just diminished by the hours of our absence. I refilled it at the sink, the sound of running water briefly drowning out the thump of Charles's music. Millie watched the process with the intensity of a creature who had been denied hydration for centuries, then plunged her face into the bowl the moment I set it down, drinking with the enthusiasm of someone making a point.

"Drama queen," I murmured, but I scratched behind her ears anyway, and her tail wagged even as she drank.

The afternoon settled into the particular rhythm of Sunday.

Mum disappeared into the bedroom not long after we arrived home, mentioning something about resting before she needed to start on dinner. The door closed behind her with a soft click, and the house absorbed her absence, adjusting its atmosphere accordingly.

I stood in the kitchen for a moment after she'd gone, struck by something I couldn't quite name. She'd seemed tired, yes — Sundays were long, and the three-hour block took its toll on everyone. But there was something else beneath the fatigue. A quality of... preparation, maybe. As if resting were only part of what she intended to do behind that closed door.

Dad had claimed the living room, settling into his usual chair with a book — one of the thick historical volumes he favoured, something about early Mormon pioneers. The kind of book that would normally absorb him completely, pulling him into another century until someone interrupted with dinner or news or the demands of ordinary life.

But today, his attention seemed elsewhere.

I noticed it as I passed through the living room, Millie trailing at my heels on her way to her preferred spot by the patio door. Dad was holding the book at the proper angle, his eyes directed toward the page, all the external markers of reading in place. But he wasn't turning the pages. Hadn't turned them, in fact, for the entire time I'd been moving through the space.

His gaze was fixed somewhere in the middle distance, seeing something the book couldn't show him.

"Good meeting today," I said, more to test the waters than because I had anything particular to add.

He looked up, and for just a moment, I saw something flicker across his face. Surprise, maybe, at being addressed. Or the quick recalibration of someone caught somewhere they hadn't expected to be found.

"It was," he agreed. His voice was steady, measured — the same calm tones he always used. But there was a weight beneath them. "Brother Leake did well with the lesson."

"Charles thought so too."

"Charles thought so publicly." A small smile touched the corner of Dad's mouth. "That was unexpected. In a good way."

"He has his moments."

"He does." Dad's attention drifted back toward the book in his hands, but his eyes didn't track the words. "We all have our moments."

I waited, sensing there might be more. The house was quiet around us — Mum behind her closed door, Charles's music a distant pulse, Millie settling into her spot with a contented sigh. The kind of quiet that sometimes invited confidences, that made space for things that couldn't be said in busier moments.

But Dad just nodded, a small movement that seemed to close the conversation rather than open it. "I should get through this chapter before dinner preparations start."

"Right. Sure."

I moved toward the back of the house, toward my room and the vague notion of changing out of my church clothes. But something made me pause at the doorway, made me look back at where Dad sat in his chair with his book and his distant gaze.

He looked older, somehow. Not physically — he was the same Dad I'd always known, the same quiet strength and steady presence. But there was a weight on his shoulders that hadn't been there that morning. Or maybe it had been there, and I just hadn't noticed it until now.

My room was exactly as I'd left it.

The bed unmade — a Sunday morning casualty I hadn't bothered to address before church. The desk cluttered with textbooks and notes from my most recent assignments, the organised chaos of a university student who knew where everything was even if it didn't look like it. The poster on the wall — a detailed illustration of Australian raptor species that I'd had since high school, its edges curling slightly now from years of humidity.

I changed out of my church clothes methodically, hanging the trousers with enough care to avoid ironing later. The familiar rhythm of the task occupied my hands while my mind drifted elsewhere.

Something was different about my parents today.

The thought had been circling since the car ride home, and it refused to settle into anything I could examine properly. They weren't fighting — there was no tension between them, no careful avoidance or clipped responses. If anything, they seemed more connected than usual. More attuned to each other.

But that connection felt weighted. Significant. Like they were holding something between them that required both their hands to carry.

Bishop Hahn's words from sacrament meeting surfaced unbidden. We are standing on the precipice of a new chapter. A divine calling awaits.

Had that been about my parents? Had they been called to something — some new responsibility, some new position in the ward or stake? That would explain the weighted glances, the silent communication. The sense of something momentous hovering just beneath the surface of ordinary Sunday.

But it didn't quite fit. Callings were announced, discussed, prayed about. They didn't usually arrive wrapped in this much... secrecy. This much unspoken intensity.

I pulled on jeans and a comfortable jumper, the kind of clothes that said Sunday afternoon rather than Sunday worship. Millie had followed me down the hallway and now lay in her spot just inside my doorway, watching me with the patient attention of a dog who had nowhere else to be.

"You don't know what's going on, do you?" I asked her.

She tilted her head at the sound of my voice, one ear pricking forward.

"Didn't think so. You just know they're acting strange. You can probably sense it, with your dog intuition. But you can't tell me what it means."

Her tail wagged once, twice — the automatic response to being addressed, regardless of content.

"Helpful as always."

I crossed to the window and looked out at the backyard. The winter afternoon was already beginning its slow fade toward evening, the light taking on that particular quality that came when the sun started its descent toward the horizon. The garden was sparse this time of year — Mum's roses dormant, the vegetable beds empty except for the winter greens she grew in the raised planters. The Hills hoist stood in the centre of the lawn, laundry-free today, its arms extended like a strange geometric sculpture.

Millie rose and padded over to stand beside me, her nose pressing against my leg.

"Not now," I said. "We'll go out later. After I figure out what I'm supposed to be doing."

She gave me a look that suggested my priorities were fundamentally misaligned, but subsided.

I moved through the house again, restless without quite knowing why. The living room, where Dad still sat with his unread book. The kitchen, where the ingredients for dinner waited in their various states of preparation. The hallway, with its family photos and slightly crooked frames that nobody ever straightened.

Everything was the same. Everything was exactly as it had always been.

And yet the house felt different. The air felt different. As if something had shifted while we were at church, some alteration in the fundamental frequency of our family that I could sense but not identify.

We are standing on the precipice of a new chapter.

Maybe Bishop Hahn had been speaking to the whole ward. Maybe the calling he'd mentioned was collective — some new initiative, some new direction for the community. Maybe my parents' strangeness had nothing to do with it at all.

Or maybe they knew something. Had been told something. Were carrying something that they hadn't yet decided to share.

The not-knowing settled into my chest like a weight. Another uncertainty to add to all the others I was already carrying.

I closed my eyes and let the quiet hold me.

Whatever was coming, it would reveal itself eventually. That was how these things worked. Secrets didn't stay secret forever, not in families. The truth always surfaced, one way or another.

I just had to wait.