AN: Unbeta'd.
Waiting for Nothing
Katie sat cross-legged on the floor, flipping through hymnals. In later years it would be nearly all Jack remembered of the cousin he would meet only that once. She was quiet, attentive to her mother, and ogled in wide-eyed curiosity when great grandma's jewels were sifted through at the kitchen table while the women tried to remember which worthless bauble, many handmade (a lace butterfly brooch, beads crudely glued to clip-on bases), had come from whom. A cool stone cross, ivory white, bore a note: "Pastor brought this back from the Holy Land." A woman whose relation to himself he did not know read from the yellowed scrap of paper.
Uncle Harold entertained Jack in the sitting room of the tiny house with a train set of some sort. In the dead of summer the air in the house was stifling. When the long-antiquated toy lost his attention, Jack squirmed into an armchair and waited.
In future years, this was always the emotion he would associate with his family, reinforced by countless wasted summer days and winter evenings: listlessness, the pointless waiting-for-nothing that made him just now trace the flower patterns on Aunt Alene's quilt, feeling the rise and fall of the stitching. He was resentfully grateful there was at least that, or else there'd be nothing to do with is hands, either. Jack's father had dropped into a shameless sleep on the couch, and Jack couldn't help but envy him. Maybe in his dreams he was visiting someplace neat.
Jack sat and waited. Patience didn't agree with him, and he swung his growing legs against the chair in a meaningless rhythm: first one, then the other, and again. He hated the idleness of these family times, but more than that, he hated that no one shared his impatience. Even Katie was happy, now searching through great grandma's glass and porcelain trinkets. He would find no accomplice here, no sympathy. He couldn't see that he had any choice but to wait it out and wish that he, like his dad, could drop into sleep instead.