Ishigreensa

Chapter 6: What Sean Wants To Do With Me I came back down wearing a pair of shorts and Uncle Sean had the stew on the table for me. “What are you wearing?” Uncle Sean asked. “Just a pair of shorts.” He sighed. “You don’t plan to go to the toilet until you can’t hold it anymore, do you?” I looked down. “I just want to be a big girl like my sisters.” He nodded. “Well, I already think you are a big girl like them. Whether you go to the toilet or not is not going to make you a big girl or a baby.” “It’s not?” “No. But wearing wet shorts against your privates for any length of time is going to make you very uncomfortable.” “But I don’t pee my pants in the day…,” but I had to stop. I do too, now. I just did it today, just before. I lowered my head. “I used to not to.” Uncle Sean got up and walked over and kneeling behind my hair, he whispered in my ear. “Honey, you don’t,” he told me. “You were out back there, and the toilet was too far away. It doesn’t count if you pee your pants out where the animals are, okay?” “It doesn’t?” “No. But I do have another idea, if you’d like to try it so you really don’t need to pee your pants out back there.” “I … um… what is it?” “Well, you can wear a skirt, and hopefully you are wearing regular panties and not your bedtime things?” “I am….” “Well, if you wear a skirt, then you can just pee in front of me, and you can adjust your panties so they get out of the way of the pee, and your skirt will cover you so you won’t have to be scared of being watched.” “Um….” “It’s okay,” Sean put a hand on my shoulder. “I’d really like you to do this for me.” “Why?” “Because I don’t want you holding it until I go back to the house all the time. I won’t get my chores done if I keep bringing you back, and I don’t want you holding it like that anymore. I promise, this compromise will mean you can pee when you want, and you won’t be going in your pants.” “Okay,” I sighed. “If you want me to….” “I do, sweetheart.” After lunch, Uncle took me by the hand and led me up to the bathroom. “Go ahead and try just so you start out comfortable,” he told me. “Then I’ll show you some more of the fences I want to fix.” “Okay.” He closed the door for me, and didn’t watch, but I still couldn’t get any to come out. I had already done it in my pants earlier, so with a sigh, I pulled up my skirt that Uncle insisted that I wear, and after washing my hands, I came out of the bathroom. “Just let me know when you want to go potty again,” Uncle told me. “If you let me know that’s what you want to do, and you go where I tell you I think is safe, I won’t come looking for you until you’ve had time to go, okay?” I nodded. “But I don’t really care if you watch me. Anyway, wasn’t the skirt so I can just go in front of you and you won’t have to see?” “I did say that, yeah. But still, people usually like a little privacy, and as long as it’s same to do so, I’d like to give you your privacy, sweetie.” “Okay.” We started to go out back and we peeked on Olive-Spot first thing. She was in the pasture, but Uncle pointed her out from a far. “We don’t want to disturb them while they are out there. See?” He pointed at rather large imposing black bull. “He’ll run us through if we disturb his family without reason. He can be ornery, but I keep him because I know with him around, wolves are going to think twice before trying to get in at our other animals.” “What about the dog?” I pointed at the dog that was lying close by. “Oh, that was Toby’s dog,” Uncle Sean frowned. “He’s very gentle, but since Toby died, we hadn’t really been expecting much from him, and now he’s pretty old. I just take care of it because that’s what Toby would have wanted.” “He doesn’t come into the house.” “No, he doesn’t. He hasn’t been in the house since maybe a week after Toby died. At first, he had been banished from coming in because of grief, and we didn’t really know what we were doing. We blamed the poor sweet animal, but once our senses came back to us, he hasn’t really found a desire to come into the house after that.” “Poor dog.” “Yeah. Humans can be very cruel when we are grieving a loss.” I looked sadly at the dog. “He’s very gentle. If you wanted to, I think think he’d let you pet him.” I nodded and started to slowly approached him. The dog’s tail thumped on the dirt and he lowered his head into my hand. “What do you know of the boy’s death?” I asked him. “It’s name is Ore,” Uncle Sean told me at last. “Toby asked where gold came from, and he was only four at the time, but when I told him its from a rock, an ore, I don’t think he really understood, but he liked the name Ore, so that’s been the dog’s name ever since.” “I’ve never heard you call its name.” “No. I don’t really feel that attached to Ore. It’s probably because I’m afraid that if I get too close to him…, well, I don’t know exactly. I just don’t want to get too close to him.” “But it’s okay if I do?” “Sure,” Uncle Sean said. “I don’t think Ore had anything at all to do with Toby’s accident. It was just a tragic thing that happened, and he was probably found there, because he was trying to help him.” I nodded. “So, you are sure it’s not the dog’s fault, but you still don’t really forgive him?” “No, honey, there is nothing to forgive. I don’t blame Ore at all. I just don’t have it in my heart to really love him right now, and I think Ore understands. Dogs are very smart creatures.” “It’s still sad,” I looked up at Uncle Sean as I pet the old dog. “I bet Ore could be a lot more help around the farm than I could be.” “Maybe,” Uncle Sean smiled. “But sometimes, things are really hard, honey.” “I know. And it’s like you said. I think Ore knows, and I think he’s still around because he forgives you for blaming him. He’s probably just waiting for you to accept him again.” Uncle Sean frowned and looked down. “Well, we have some fences to mend.” “Can Ore come?” “He’s a free creature. He can do what he likes.” I called him, and we all walked towards the first of many fences that Uncle wanted to fix. We came to a broken section that had several missing boards for nearly three parts of the fence. This was where he kept some goats, and I could see the goats just beyond, grazing on the grass out there. “What kind of animals are those?” I asked wondering because I had not seen a goat up close before, and the pictures of them always showed them all with horns. “Those are goats, sweetheart.” “Where are their horns?” “Horns?” he chuckled. “Well, not all goats have horns.” I frowned. “They don’t?” “No, sweetheart.” He started to measure some points on the first pole, where he’d replace one of the boards that was broken off, and then he measured points on another pole, and he smiled up at me. “We’ll be replacing the boards between these poles.” “Those don’t look dangerous,” I told Uncle Sean. “Now. I’m not going to be replacing the fence anywhere near the dangerous animals,” he told me. “Not while you are out here with me. The further you are kept from the more aggressive animals, the better.” “Okay.” “Sweetheart? How strong are you?” Uncle Sean asked me. I balled up my fist and rose my arm like you see those men that show off their muscles do, and I presented my little lump in my arm at him. It wasn’t very big at all, but it was stiff. It didn’t sag the way Popeye’s arm did before he ate his spinach. Uncle Sean felt my arm, and he gave me a serious looked. “Okay, then let’s see.” I looked up at him. “I’m going to put this board up here, and use this other one to hold it in place. I’d like you to hold the piece that holds it in place, and lean on the main fence board so I can work on the other side of the fence hammering it into place. Can you try that?” “Of course! I’m strong,” I said proudly. “Okay, but if it gets too heavy or it hurts your hands, you are to jump back and away from it so the board doesn’t hit you, understand?” I looked up at him. “I mean it, tiger. I don’t want you getting hurt. How about we practice you jumping away first?” I looked up at him. Was this for real? He held the boards together and I watched, and then I saw him jump back releasing the boards. “Can you do it just like that?” I nodded. He did it a few times with me until I laughed about it. He smiled, too. Though I knew he didn’t want me to get hurt, I couldn’t tell if he was doing this for practice, or if he was kind of playing with me, but he did make it fun to practice. “Okay,” he smiled as it seemed I had caught on. “One more thing. If you see a snake, try not to move. Most snakes are not aggressive if you don’t move. You are a little too big for most of them to be interested in eating you, and if you are quiet and don’t move, then you are not a threat to them, either.” “Okay.” “You stay perfectly still if you see one, and even if I yell at you, you stay still. I’ll come and see why you are not responding to me, and I’d rather you disobey me and not get bit than you try to come when I call you, and the snake get scared and bite you. Okay?” “Okay.” The other end of the board wasn’t that far away though. I think he could have easily seen if a snake was near me, but maybe he was just trying to teach me how not to get bit if I wasn’t near him. I wasn’t sure. He sure didn’t like me being far from him though. He was really upset earlier when I just went to find a broom to help him. I don’t know how long it took to repair those three sections, but I was kind of hot out there, though by then, we’d been outside pretty much all morning, and at least an hour into the afternoon. “Are you drinking your water?” Uncle Sean asked me. “Oh, I’m not thirsty,” I told him. I was hot, but I didn’t really think about drinking anything until he asked about it. He had given me a strange container to drink from when we came back from lunch. “It’s a water flask,” he had told me when we came out earlier. “It’s what the pioneers used when they were traveling west.” “I thought they used canteens,” I said referring to the rounded things I had seen on the westerns. “No, sweetie, those were used some later, but most people used water flasks first. Canteens were invented a lot later.” “They were?” Anyway, I pulled my flask off my hip, it was dangling there tied around a belt Uncle Sean had put on me. I thought the belt as to hold my skirt up at first, but when he put the water thing there, then I understood why it wasn’t doing anything to hold the skirt, not that the skirt needed it. It fit me just fine thought it was kind of stained from me always sitting on the ground back at home. “Go ahead, honey. Drink some,” he smiled and took a drink from his own flask. “We still have a lot of work to do, and I don’t want you getting tired or too hot out here.” “Okay.” Though I didn’t understand why he said he didn’t want me to get tired, or what water had to do with it. Section by section, we repaired the three segments of the fence that Uncle Sean wanted, and I was really helping him. I could hold up one side of the board, well, at least keep it held up and in place with the stick Uncle asked me to hold against the loose wood, and he even let me hit the fence several times with the hammer. The first time I tried to use the hammer, it was a little harder than I thought. “That’s it,” Uncle Sean encouraged me. “Now, step to the side, and swing the hammer at the nail.” I did what he said, and then it hit the wood instead, denting it some. I looked down. “Honey, try again,” he one hand on my shoulder. “Do you think I hit he nail perfectly the first time I tried?” “But you at least hit the nail?” I asked. “No, sweetheart. I didn’t. The nail is a very small surface, and it takes practice to hit it. “Now, no giving up, okay? Shelley keeps telling me how much help you are, and you can’t be much help if you give up so easily, now can you?” I frowned shaking my head. “I’m not giving up. I just didn’t want to ruin your fence.” “Baby, we are replacing this area because it was already damaged. It won’t hurt anything if we have to put a few extra nails in, alright?” “Okay.” “Now, try again. You can do it.” I missed the nail like ten or twenty times, but Uncle kept telling me to hit it until finally, I did! I hit it. I got so excited, I nearly forgot what the goal was and was jumping up and down excited that I pushed the nail in a little bit more. “Sweetheart, sweetie! Baby! Samantha!” Uncle had to call at me several times before I looked up from celebrating. “The nail isn’t all the way in, yet. Please do it again.” “Oh,” I felt my face get a little red. “It’s okay,” he chuckled. “I can’t remember one kid that didn’t get excited the first time they hit the nail right, myself included. But we can’t forget about the fence, okay?” “Yes, sir.” He rubbed my head. “Hit the nail, baby.” I took aim, and missed the nail three more times, and then hit it hard, and it sank some more. Uncle smiled at me and nodded at the board each time, and eventually, I got the nail in. “Shelley was right. You really are a great help, sweetie!” I felt myself blush again. I don’t know why they said I was help, but it felt good every time they did, and I did get the nail in all by myself, too. We left the goats, and Uncle took me to the produce growing area, where he had potatoes, watermelon, and other things growing. “I’m going to enter that one at the fair contest next month,” Uncle Sean pointed out a giant watermelon. “I’ve been working on that one for sometime, and I think it might be the biggest one yet.” “Am I going to the fair, too?” I asked. “Of course, sweetie. We’ll not be leaving you out of any of the fun this summer.” I smiled. We waded through fields with onions, cucumbers, and others things, too. Uncle showed me what he as doing as we went through the fields. I was drinking my water properly now as it got really hot, and Uncle was drinking his, too. “How are you feeling, baby?” he asked me after we had done a lot of amazing things. I could now see why Uncle spent a long time out in the field, but it made me wonder why daddy didn’t. “Great!” I said smiling up at him. He put an arm around me. “I need a moment, but I don’t want you anywhere dangerous, so can you hang out over here?” he asked me directing me a place where I could see the horses. “Yeah. I can wait here for you.” I didn’t want to be a problem for Uncle. I looked at the prized watermelon and some of the other things they were growing while Uncle took a little time to do something he didn’t want me to see. I supposed that if he wasn’t taking me back to the house, like every five minutes, then maybe he was doing the same thing he would have wanted me to do…. I didn’t really mind though. I’d pulled my pants down at our own place when I was by myself in the fields, only if daddy caught me, and he sometimes did, I’d get it for behaving like an animal instead of a little girl. “Now, we can go ahead and go start rounding up the animals,” Uncle told me. “It’s about time to start directing them back to their sleeping places so they can be safe for the night. As I told you before, there are dangerous things out there, even things that can kill the larger animals.” “Yes, sir.” He rubbed my head and then took me by the hand as we went to get the goats first. Uncle didn’t want me to go anywhere without telling him, and I kind of understood, now, that it wasn’t that he was controlling me, but because he really thought there were things out there that could hurt me. I still thought he was just being a worrier though because snakes had never bothered me before, and I was assured that our place back home had a lot of them, too. He let me touch one of the goats for a moment after we put them in their little inside space. “You’re a cute little guy,” I told the goat I touched on the head. It looked at me with its rather large round eyes. “That one is Splutterdiggs,” Uncle told me. “That’s a funny name.” “Well, I call him that because of the way he behaves, sweetie. He can be ornery at times.” We left the goats, and Uncle Sean put a hand around my shoulder as we walked out towards the cows. “It’s pretty out here,” I told Uncle as I saw the sky starting to take on a sort of an orange-like hue. “It is, sometimes, yeah,” he smiled down at me. “This is why I live out here, and have never really liked it in the city. Cities are crowded, you nearly never see the stars at night, and it’s hard to find an open enough space to even see the sky change colors in the early morning or the late evenings.” I nodded. I didn’t know what he was talking about since I had lived on a farm all my life and had known nothing but the large expansive sky overhead. Daddy never got me up early enough, really, to enjoy the early morning, and I rarely ever saw the sky change colors in the evening because I always had to be inside long before that. We came upon the cows, and Uncle Sean pointed out a place behind where the main gate swung open. “I want you behind there,” he told me. “Why?” “Sometimes, the cows can come charging out of the gate, and they aren’t going to run into the fence because it hurts them to do so, for the most part.” “Oh.” Uncle then walked into the area, and as he did so, he grabbed some rope that was hanging off a pole of the fence. I kind of wanted to pee. Uncle told me the reason for wearing a skirt was so I could pee in front of him and not have to worry about being watched, but I had panties on. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to not get my panties wet, so I kept holding it. I’d ask him after he finished getting the cows to come out of the pasture. Though Uncle had worried about them charging out of the fence, it seemed they were pretty calm at this time, and Uncle was leading one of the brown cows, closely behind it, the big strong snorting bull was in tow, and then the other cows were coming along. I saw Olive-Spot, and I came out from behind the fence and walked towards her. The big cow next to her lowered her head at me, and looked into my eyes with one of her great orbs as if daring me to touch her baby. “I’m not going to hurt her, I promise,” I crossed my heart with my fingers at the cow. “We’re just taking you home so your baby will be safe.” The cow kept staring at me, and she swished her tail, but she seemed to let me walk with them just the same. We got the cows put into their holding areas, and I hurried to Uncle’s side. “Excuse me, sir?” He bent down and pushed a stand of hair from my eyes and around my ear. “Yes, sweetheart?” “I have to pee….” He nodded. “If you want a little privacy, we can walk around to the back, and then I’ll wait around the corner for you.” “Well, you said that it’s dangerous, and you told me I’m wearing a skirt so I can just do it, but I’m not sure how to keep my panties dry if I just do it.” “Oh, well, you and turn around and pull your panties off, and hold them while you go, and spread your legs out a bit, but stand up kind of straight, and it should just go straight to the ground. You can go ahead and remove your panties in here, and I’ll turn my back until you take them off.” I looked up at him. “And it’s okay to do this?” “Sweetie, anything is better than you running off on your own. If you are uncomfortable doing this, then you can go around the corner from me, or if that’s scary, you can even just wet through your panties, it’s up to you, sweetheart.” “I don’t pee my pants, Uncle.” “I know, sweetheart. That’s why I insisted you wear a skirt, so you have some options open that still kind of keep you decent, but will let you pee without it getting all over you.” “That’s still kind of like peeing my pants, though, isn’t it?” I asked Uncle. “Honey, what do you mean? If you spread your legs and pee on the ground under your skirt, the only thing that will get wet, if you don’t remove them, is your panties.” I looked down. “I… I don’t want to pull down my panties outside.” “You don’t have to, honey.” “But then I’ll be wetting my pants?” He sighed. “Well, I’m almost done out here anyway. If you promise to go straight to the house, and don’t come back out after you are done. Just play or something in the house if Shelley isn’t back?” “But you don’t want me to go to the house by myself?” “It’s not my first choice, no,” he frowned. “We are still a little ways from it, and if you met a snake or something on the way….” I sighed and looked down. “I’ve not seen a snake at all, though.” “I know. They usually hide around very large animals, but I still worry about you.” “I… do you want me to wet my pants?” I whispered up at him trying to get a read. “No, sweetheart. I don’t want you to do anything that would scare you or make you feel bad. Wetting your pants at eight years old doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in yourself.” “So…, you are saying…?” I asked. He frowned at me. “Honey? Don’t you understand? I’m saying I don’t want you to do anything that makes you feel bad about yourself.” “So…?” He sighed. “Don’t pee your pants, baby.” “I don’t know how long I can wait.” “Okay. Well, you can go behind a building and I’ll be around a corner in case you need me, you can just go under your skirt, or you can go back home.” “But you don’t want me to walk back to the house on my own.” “No, honey, I don’t want that, but if it’s the only way to not make you pee your pants, then I don’t see what choice I have. Your health and happiness come first.” “I can hold it.” “No, sweetie. That’s the one thing I do not want you to do anymore. You’re holding it too long, and as it is, I bet you’ve already been waiting, haven’t you?” I looked down. “Yes sir.” “So either way, you need to pee right now. The options are, around the corner, under your skirt or back at the house.” I squirmed for a moment. “I… I don’t want to worry you, so I’ll do it here, but….” “You don’t know if you want to do it under your skirt or around a corner?” I nodded. “How about this? Just reach inside your skirt and pull your panties off, and you can do that over there behind the hay bails, and then we can come outside, and you can pee on the ground, and then you can go back behind the hay bails to put your panties back on?” “I won’t be able to wipe.” “I know, but at least you won’t have to pee in your panties, and we can have you change your panties when we get back to the house.” “Okay.” I understood why he didn’t want me to just pee behind the hay bails, because they were still inside the building. And at least, this way, I didn’t wet my pants, so I did what he said. We eventually got all the animals inside, and were headed back to the house. Uncle Sean was holding my hand. “When we get inside, you can go up and wash yourself off in the bathroom a little bit, and then put on some clean panties. Just put the dirty ones by your other clothes. I’ll make sure Shelley knows you didn’t wet again, but I just had you change because you didn’t have anything to wipe with this time.” I nodded. “Have you never peed outside at your own farm?” he asked me. “Well, I did,” I frowned looking down. “I mean, I did all the time, actually, but I was by myself. No one knew I was doing it.” He smiled. “So, you were scared to do it because I was there, or because I knew about it?” “Both,” I admitted. “I was kind of scared of getting in trouble for it, and kind of embarrassed. I had never even done it if my sisters were close by.” “Well, as long as you have privacy, I don’t see it as being a big deal,” Uncle Sean said. “People have been going out in nature since before the idea of cities, and when people camp, unless they are at a modern fancy campsite, they still have to do it outside.” I frowned. “Daddy once caught Leah going outside, and I think we were camping, even, but he got really mad at her. She got it good for that, and then she wasn’t allowed to play even with the older sisters watching her. He watched her the whole time.” Uncle Sean frowned. “Well, I suppose you were at a modern campsite where there were people around?” I shrugged. “Probably.” “Even still,” he sighed. “I don’t think he should have spanked her. When did this happen?” “I don’t remember, I think maybe the year before last?” “So you were around six at the time?” “Yeah.” “And that would have made her around eight?” “I think so….” Uncle Sean shook his head. “Well, even if he needed to explain to her not to do that around other people, he shouldn’t have spanked her.” We went in the house, and I really felt my mouth get wide and my heart fill with delight as I saw Aunt Shelley in the kitchen working on something. “Did you have fun out back?” she asked me with a smile. “I did…,” I smiled. “Except I was bad before lunch.” Uncle Sean shook his head at Aunt Shelley. “She wasn’t bad. She just forgot the rule not to leave my sight, and it turned out she had to go potty.” “...And I peed my pants,” I finished telling on myself so I wasn’t lying to her. She said no secrets and no lying at her house. “She did have an accident,” Uncle Sean confirmed. “That’s why she’s in a skirt now and not the jeans from earlier. I figured a skirt would make it easier for her to go without being exposed if she had to do it in front of me.” Aunt Shelley smiled and walked over, and hugged me. “She’s been dry since then, though, and we did let her go like twice while we were working. The last time, she was still too nervous, and I had to direct her, but she pulled off her underpants behind a hay bail, and then peed on the ground outside before putting them back on again. She really has to be watched, or she’ll hold it until it’s impossible for her.” Aunt Shelley nodded. “I know. Poor child. I’m going to take her to clean her up.” “Sure. Anything I can do to help you stay on schedule with dinner?” “Not really. I just came in the door about a minute before you did, so it’s going to be late one way or another.” “Well, I’ll start peeling the potatoes then,” Uncle Sean said, and then Aunt Shelley took me by the hand took me to take a bath. Later in the evening, Uncle Sean had me in his arms, and I was sitting on his lap watching television, both Uncle and Aunt right there. I felt pretty happy at the moment, and I felt my eyes getting heavy. I was glad I was there, and slowly my breathing was slowing, and my eyes were getting heavy. I was safe, and even if I peed right now, Auntie would call it bed wetting, and I wouldn’t be in trouble. The darkness of my closed eyes had cleared. I looked around, in the empty school halls, but I could only see one figure, force marching from the fifth grade rooms towards the toilets. I frowned as the figure got closer to me, and then she turned right into the toilets not even recognizing me. I think it was Leah. I walked into the bathroom behind her, but I didn’t end up in the bathroom. I was in the office, and daddy was there, and he had swatted me on the thighs to sit still while the principal was telling him something. “She pushed a first grader on the playground,” my dad was told. “Now, fighting at school isn’t even tolerated, but certainly picking on younger kids is something that has to be taken seriously. She’s a bully!” I felt tears in my eyes as the principal had taken the other kids’ word at value and ignored what really happened. Daddy yanked me by the arm, and I was having to nearly run to keep up with him as he pulled me around through the halls, and then we came face to face with Leah. She was coming out of the bathroom. “Where is your class?” he demanded of her. “Um… in the classroom?” I saw Leah shaking a little bit. She knew she was in trouble. She broke the rules. I woke up and was shaking myself. I opened my eyes, and looked around into the darkness of the room, taking in all the silhouettes, and the missing extra bed. I finally realized I wasn’t at home right now, and this was nearly three months later. I was at Uncle Sean’s house, and I felt it, then. I was peeing. Sitting up, I pushed the blankets back, but the pee kept coming out, and I finished in my bedding. I sniffled. I sat there for several minutes, not sure what to make of what had happened. I remember that day, actually, from my dream. A first grader had come and kicked me and then ran away. I chased him. I was mad! He kicked me for no reason at all. He tried to get away by climbing up a slide, but in his hurry, he lost his balance or something and fell. I shivered. Because I got mad at him, I got in trouble for fighting, and I got Leah in trouble. We knew better than to leave work undone, and if we were in our classrooms, and the teachers teaching, then we had unfinished work. Daddy wouldn’t have caught her out of the classroom, if he had not been there to get me for fighting. Leah didn’t talk to me for two days because daddy got really mad and when she got home, she was spanked hard. I finished peeing, and I sighed and looked over at my door. Did I just pee on purpose in my bed? I guess I kind of did. I stood up and started to pull the blankets off my bed. Aunt Shelley had put a plastic under the sheets, so at least the bed didn’t get a huge pee stain on it, the sheets were soaked. I got the sheets off, and then I went to lay on the plastic, and before I got the top quilt to pull over me, I saw the door open, and the tall slender frame of my aunt reached out and turned on the light. “Are you okay?” she asked as she came over and pulled me off the plastic sheets that still had a puddle where I was about to settle again. I looked down. “I wet my pants.” “I told you, already, baby. At night, it’s no different than wetting the bed to me. It’s not your fault, sweetheart.” I sighed and looked up at her. “I got Leah in trouble.” “Honey, she’s way over in other state. How could you have gotten her in trouble?” I frowned and looked down. “I got in trouble at school, and then daddy caught her being bad because he had to come and sort out what I did.” “Honey, you are not at school,” Aunt Shelley reminded me. “You haven’t been at school since Saturday, sweetheart. Your school year is over.” “Oh, yeah, sorry. I meant, I was thinking about the day I got Leah in trouble. She was so mad at me, she didn’t talk to me for two days.” Aunt hugged me for a moment after getting me out of the soaked bed, and then she walked me over to the closet to get me a long shirt and another pair of my bedtime panties to sleep in. “Honey, that happened a while ago. I’m sure she’s forgotten about it. Besides, if she did something truly bad, then you had nothing to do with her getting caught, baby. She was going to get caught anyway if she did something.” “But… daddy wouldn’t have known,” I muttered looking down as she put the nightshirt on me. “But then it would be lying.” “But I wouldn’t have known, so I wouldn’t be lying. Besides, I think sometimes, lying to daddy or at least not telling daddy something can get us not in trouble. Sometimes, we get in trouble, but I don’t think other kids get in trouble for the same things.” Aunt Shelley frowned. “Well, come on, baby,” and she picked me up and carried me to their room for the second night in a row. “What’s happened?” Uncle looked up at Aunt Shelley. “She had a nightmare.” “Aw… poor baby. Put her right here,” and he reached out his arms and brought me down right next to him between Aunt Shelley and himself. “Go to sleep, sweetie. You’re safe now.” My eyes once again closed, and when the darkness lifted, I felt a little smaller somehow, and if things around me were a little bigger. I was being carried, I think, and my pants were soaking wet. Gracie was nearby, but she didn’t look the same as usual. She had longer hair, and she seemed a little lighter in build. I looked back at the car, the door still open, and I saw two wet areas where we had sat. I think I was in Gracie’s lap and we were in the middle and the middle was wet. I must have peed on Gracie. Leah’s seat area was wet nearer to us by the open door, and Jenna’s spot was the only dry one. I frowned as I looked around and realized Daddy was holding me and patting my wet bottom. Mom was holding baby Katie-Beth, and she was a baby. She couldn’t have even been a year old yet. He was yelling at Gracie, who was ten years old and at Leah. Both to them had their eyes looking down, and tears running down their faces. Both of them had peed in pants on, but I did too. Daddy wasn’t yelling at me, though. Jenna was the only one not even wet. “Daddy?” I squirmed in his arms. “I peed peed my pants. Gracie holding me.” “Baby, shush,” Daddy let me down while he got closer to Leah and Gracie. I woke up again, this time, light was coming through the window, and I saw that Aunt Shelley was still lying next to me, her eyes open, and she was rubbing my tummy. Uncle Sean was already out of the room. Then, I frowned. I felt wet. I peed again. “Are you alright?” Aunt Shelley asked me as I looked up at her wondering how I was going to tell her I peed in her bed. I sighed. I didn’t want to say I was alright because I peed in her bedding. I was sorry I got her sleeping space wet. “Sweetheart,” she whispered soothingly to me. “What is it? You didn’t have another bad dream, did you?” I gulped. Did she know everything I did? “You can talk to me,” Aunt Shelley told me. “I promise, you are safe here, baby.” She pushed and pulled me up onto her and by then, she could tell I had soaked myself again, and I started to feel myself shake with silent sobs. “What is it, sweetheart?” she asked as she rubbed my back while I lay wet and straddled over her, my legs splayed around her lower tummy. Tears came out of my eyes, and I shook and shook, and couldn’t stop. “It’s alright, baby.” She put both her arms around me, protectively, and she stared to rock me, sitting up as she did so, she adjusted me. She touched my wet butt. She had to know what I did, but she still seemed clueless about what I was upset about. And I realized, she didn’t know I was upset I peed. She kept telling me it’s okay if I wet the bed. I tried to choke the tears off so I could speak, but it was hard. The sobbing kept coming, and the words were taken away from the force that caused me to cry. “Baby…. It’s okay,” she eventually breathed evenly and soothingly into my ear. “I know it’s embarrassing and scary,” she continued. “But you just had an accident in your sleep, baby. You’re not in trouble, and you didn’t hurt anything. You are okay, baby.” She did know, at least by now, why I couldn’t stop sobbing. It was quite an emotional roller coaster, and Aunt Shelley called Shay Anne that morning. “I’m really sorry, but my cousin’s child is staying with us, and she’s really needy right now. Is your dad doing alright?” I sighed. I didn’t want Aunt Shelley to think I was too much trouble. “I… I can play with Uncle Sean with the animals again,” I tried to tell her while she was on the phone, but she put an arm around me while she spoke to this Shay that I had no idea of who it was. “I’m glad he’s feeling better,” Aunt Shelley told her. “Maybe in a day or so I’ll bring little Sammy with me, and the you can meet her. She’s a nice little girl, but she has had some trouble adjusting to the new rules around our house.” I heard silence for a bit, and then Aunt Shelley hung up the phone with a soft goodbye. “No, sweetheart, I think we need to talk today,” she told me as she directed me back to the table, and we started to eat. “Sean?” “Yeah, Shelley?” “Do you think after you’ve fed the animals, you can take us to town today?” “Oh, um… sure. Is there something you needed?” “Well, not me,” and she nodded in my direction. “We’ve been talking about it the last few nights, you know?” He smiled and looked down. “Yeah, about that…. Okay. I’ll just go check on the animals, and he quickly left the table not even finishing his breakfast. “What?” I looked up at Aunt Shelley wondering what was doing on. “Honey, you’ve been having a hard time over the last few days here, and you still won’t go to the bathroom on your own most of the time….” I frowned. “I don’t pee my pants….” “Baby, that’s why I’m worried. If you at least peed your pants sometimes, then at least we’d know your bladder was working properly.” “I don’t understand. I’m eight. I’m not supposed to….” “You are not supposed to under normal conditions,” Aunt Shelley pulled me into her lap. “But baby, there is nothing normal about your behavior at all. You need help, sweetie.” “Why? I am a big girl! I can do even better. I won’t pee the whole day. I bet I can hold it until the sun goes down.” Aunt Shelley shook her had and rubbed my back. “No, baby. Please don’t do that.” “But you want me to pee my pants!” “Honey, I don’t want that either, but the alternative being that you are always holding it way beyond what is healthy, yeah, I would prefer you being wet to you not peeing at all.” “But I’m not supposed to…,” and I started crying. Aunt Shelley sighed and rubbed my back. I buried my face in her chest and continued to crying not understanding what exactly they wanted of me. Uncle tried to make it so I wouldn’t pee my pants, but right now, Aunt Shelley acted like I should do just that. I was feeling really confused and wondered what bad things I was doing that made them act so confusing. “Baby?” Aunt Shelley rubbed my back and spoke softly. “How about this? Will you please tell us as soon as you have to go? We are going into town, and you aren’t supposed to be wet around other people are you?” I shook my head no. “Daddy says that’s being bad.” “Well, we are going to be around other people, so will you please come and squeeze my hand when you need to pee again? If you squeeze my hand, I’ll just take you to the toilet, and you don’t have to talk or say anything. Then, you are not really saying anything you are scared to say, and you are not interrupting if you just squeeze my hand, and I’ll know to get you to the bathroom before you start squirming around. Would that be okay?” I looked up at her for several minutes trying to think how my squeezing her hand might break daddy’s rules…. “You do as your mom’s cousin tells you,” he had said. “But remember the house rules, too.” I remembered them alright. I would never break a rule daddy had for any reason. Never embarrass people by saying things that are personal. Eating and going to the bathroom will be taken care of in time. There is no need to say anything about those things. “Honey, just squeeze my hand,” Aunt Shelley told me. “Then I’ll know you have to go, and you won’t start squirming around….” That kind of made sense. I wasn’t saying anything, and Aunt Shelley didn’t want me squirming around, so this kept her not getting embarrassed. It seemed to follow daddy’s rules. “Okay.” “Good girl,” she kissed my head. “Can you come upstairs so I can get you cleaned up so we can go into town?” “Okay. Thank you. Sorry, when I looked back, I didn't really know how to fix the first time I tried to describe her age, so it hasn't been fixed. In my mind, it is getting the age correct, so I think maybe I'm just not seeing something you are at the moment. I'll try again later to see what is unclear. I know sometimes, when I am writing, I think I'm reading something when actually, I'm just remembering and the words are not actually reading as they should to my eye, so I'll try to look again later on, after I have let it be forgotten what I had in my head so I can see if that clarity helps me see through the illusion my mind is using to hold me back from seeing it.

Yes, due to the way she's been treated at home, she does have some growth issues as far as her mental state. Remember, everyone thinks she is a liar and that she pees herself all the time on purpose. She had, until that first time that she couldn't hold it on the farm, always managed to hold it until class was out at school. She's confused about what big kids are supposed to do, and her dear old dad and mom are confusing her by expecting her to "behave" and stuff. She is eight though, and eventually, Uncle and Aunt are going to start worrying about her actions because she is pretty far behind developmentally from what they know kids are like. Truth be told, her other sisters are not much better off.... But we'll see some of the things that happens through flashbacks starting in the next chapter or two.

Chapter Five: I did a No-no, but Sean was worried about something else I woke up between Aunt Shelley and Uncle Sean, and nervously, I felt under myself hoping I wouldn’t be wet. Inside my panties, I didn’t feel it, but I wasn’t sure. I was scared of being wet. But as I pressed my hand under my butt, and then even inside my panties, I felt a huge wash of relief come over me. I had somehow not peed in the night, and their bedding was spared. Aunt Shelley noticed that I was stirring, and when I looked up, I saw her smiling down at me. “What’s wrong, sweetie?” she asked. “N...nothing?” I was a little bit nervous of telling her that I was checking because I was scared of having peed in their bed. She pulled me towards her, and lifted me up over on her stomach. “It’s okay, baby,” she said as she patted my butt as if checking me, too. “You have nothing to be scared of here, sweetheart.” I glanced over at Sean. “Sean wouldn’t be upset, either, sweetie,” Auntie told me. “We put you in our bed because we kind of scared you yesterday, and didn’t feel it right to make you sleep by yourself after scaring you.” “You didn’t scare me,” I felt my face heat up a little bit. “Well, if you didn’t get scared, then that concerns me even more,” Aunt Shelley said. “The things we were talking about last night can be scary for a little girl, and if they weren’t, then that means you’ve been through worse, sweetie.” I shrugged. Uncle Sean reached a hand over and rubbed my back, suddenly. I flinched at first until I realized he was just trying to comfort me. “I need to get up, sweetheart. But if you are tired, you can rest a little longer,” Uncle Sean said. “I want to get up,” I sniffled. “I… I think I want to go pee.” “Of course,” Aunt Shelley smiled. “Come on, I’ll take you, sweetheart.” She let me get up, and then she took my hand and walked me to the bathroom while Uncle Sean started to get dressed. We got down to the kitchen, and I saw that Uncle Sean had pour some black coffee into Aunt Shelley’s favorite cup, and he had cup for himself, and in front of my seat, there was some orange drink. I smiled up as I sat down. “Sammy if a lot of help,” Aunt Shelley told him. “She doesn’t really cause any trouble at all, and she’s always trying to help out if I let her.” Uncle Sean smiled. “That’s a good girl.” “We’ll have to keep a closer eye on her for a few days though, until she gets comfortable with knowing that she’s allowed to do things around here.” “Surely,” Uncle Sean nodded. “I still don’t believe the things they did to that child.” “Would you like some blueberry pancakes?” Aunt Shelley asked me. “Yes…, ma’am?” She smiled and got up and went to get some bowls and other things to start making them. “I’m going to just go check on Olive-Spot,” Uncle Sean said standing up. “I’ll be right back.” “Sure,” Aunt Shelley smiled at him I got up, too. “What you doing, pet?” she asked me. “I’m going to help you, or maybe clean up the blocks, or….” “Baby, sit down,” Aunt Shelley told me. “You don’t have to be doing a chore just because you see me or your uncle doing something. I’ll let you know if I need some help, and your blocks are fine where they are right now.” “My blocks?” I asked her. “Well, who do you think is going to be playing with those?” Aunt Shelley asked me. “Toby is gone, and Sean and I are into other games. Someone has to play with them, so we might as well give them to you to use while you are with us.” I looked down a little sad for her. She must really miss Toby. “Sit, sweetheart. Drink your drink, and I’ll have some hotcakes on your plate in a little bit, okay?” “Alright.” Uncle Sean came in the door with a big smile on his face and he sat at the table next to me. “Little Olive-Spots is going to be just fine,” he whispered to me. “She’s made a full turn around.” “Can I see her?” “Maybe in a day or two,” Uncle Sean told me. “I still have some things I want to get done before I take you out there with me. There are several broken fences that could expose you to danger, and while you are out there, you’ll have to say right next to me.” I looked up at him and he stood and picked me out of my seat and then sat me in his lap. “Some of the animals are a bit dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing,” he whispered to me. “I need to teach you how to handle them so they don’t get spooked. A spooked bull is very dangerous, especially to a small child like you.” “Okay.” “There are other hidden dangers out there, too, besides the normal animals I’ve got to take care of. There are snakes and other things that don’t care about what humans want, and when they get scared, they bite, and many snakes that bite, can kill you.” “Because of poison?” I asked. “Yes, sweetheart, because of venom. Venom is a special poison that animals make to help them either defend themselves or help them kill larger animals to eat. Snake venom is very dangerous for humans.” I nodded. “Daddy says that I can’t go to our fields, too. He says there are a lot of snakes out there, but I’ve never seen any, and I often go into the fields alone.” “Well, I don’t want you wandering off in the fields around here, okay?” “Why? Snakes don’t really bother me.” “I just don’t want to take any chances with you, baby.” I sighed. “Okay…,” I drew the word out in a long breath. “Sammy,” Aunt Shelley sounded a little sharp. “No, baby. Respond to Uncle Sean correctly. He’s just looking out for you, and he’s right. You are not to be out there alone, okay?” “Yes, ma’am. Yes sir.” “I know we sound grumpy and a bit strict,” Uncle Sean said as he patted my leg. “But I grew up on this farm, and I understand that dangers that are out there.” “I know,” I looked down. “Daddy says the same thing to us, but I can’t help it. I didn’t have anywhere I could be on my own when I needed space at home. I share a bedroom with my little sister, and it’s just so crowded around there.” “Well, you have your own bedroom here,” Shelley spoke again from the counter where she was working. “If you need time to yourself, you can just let me know that you need time and then go to your room, okay?” I smiled and looked down at my lap. We were eating breakfast, some blueberry hotcakes, scrambled eggs and sausage when the phone rang. “Excuse me,” Aunt Shelley got up and went to the phone. Uncle Sean frowned as he watched her go to the phone, so I asked. “Is everything okay?” “I’m not sure, sweetie,” he told me. “Neighbors don’t usually disturb breakfast time around here. I was still wearing my nightshirt and bedtime panties because it was still early morning, and I think Aunt Shelley was going to have me change after breakfast. “You don’t say…,” I heard Aunt say. “You poor dear, of course….” “By the sounds of it, I think Shelley might be a bit busy to watch you today,” Uncle Sean told me. “It looks like I could be taking you out on the farm before I meant to.” I couldn’t help it, though, I was a little bit excited getting to see the farm and the animals. “Of course,” Aunt Shelley was sounding very serious and sympathetic. “I’ll be over as soon as I can.” Hanging up the phone, she walked over and took a deep breath as if she was about to try to talk Uncle Sean into something. “It’s Shay Anne, is it?” Uncle Sean beat her to the punch. “Yeah,” Aunt Shelley closed her eyes. “It’s actually her dad.” “Well, he’s getting up there in years,” Uncle was patiently trying to get Aunt Shelley to get out what was to be done. “He is,” Aunt Shelley looked at Uncle directly. “The thing is, he got sick last night.” “Okay…,” Uncle Sean said smiling at her. “...And she’s asking for some help, right?” Aunt Shelley nodded grimly and she looked over at me in seriousness. “Don’t worry about her,” Uncle Sean told Aunt Shelley. “I can keep her with me today.” “Are you sure? You said there were dangerous places you needed to mend first?” “I’d preferred to have had them mended, but Sammy is big enough to know not to wander off. If she stays with me, she’ll be okay.” Aunt Shelley nodded. “I’m sure she will. She’s been on my heels the last two days.” “I promise,” I heard myself verbalizing in a soft tone knowing that this was important to Aunt Shelley. Aunt Shelley didn’t leave right away though. She worked a little more in the kitchen while Uncle went back outside. While she worked, she asked me to play in the living room, and I did so wanting to stay out of her way. When she was done in the kitchen, she took me upstairs, got me a bath and dressed in jeans, a short sleeve pink shirt and insisted I put some boots on. Then she walked me out to find Uncle repairing a fence. “Well, I’m ready to go. Shall I just leave her here with you then?” “You shall,” Uncle nodded. “Don’t worry. She’ll be okay.” “Alright, well, I’ve left some stew in the oven for you to heat up for lunch in case I’m not back by then.” “Then we won’t die of hunger,” Sean said a small smile on his lips. I smiled, too. “Well, I’ll be off, then.” Uncle Sean turned and squatted down to me, hugging me with his hammer in one hand draped around me. “Please stay close and don’t wander off, okay?” I smiled up at him. “Okay.” Uncle brought me to the cows, and he sat a stool down and a bucket, and he waved at me to sit a little ways out of the way. “This is how you get milk from the cow,” he told me. “Gentle but firm, you work the udder to get milk into the bucket.” I watched as he explained it to me. “Is it hard to do?” I asked him. “It’s tricky at first until you get the hang of it, but you shouldn’t pull too hard. You can hurt the cow, and of course, some cows will kick you if you hurt them.” I smiled. “I would, too.” “Maybe I’ll show you later, okay?” “Alright.” I watched as he milked the cow, and then he patted her off so she could go. “I think daddy uses a machine for ours.” “Yeah, people are always telling me to upgrade,” Uncle Sean smiled. “But you know, somethings, I don’t think should be upgraded.” “Does daddy’s machine hurt the cows?” I asked. “Maybe. I don’t really know. I just know I don’t trust them.” “How come Aunt Shelley is looking after Shay’s daddy?” “She’s not,” Uncle Sean said which made me wonder what I thought I heard. “She’s helping Shay. It’s Shay that’s looking after her father.” “Oh,” I wondered. “Don’t you help your neighbors at times?” “I don’t know,” I put my finger on my chin trying to remember if I had ever seen daddy helping someone, or even getting a phone call to ask for help. “Well, the world is a bit hard,” Uncle Sean told me. “People live in groups because we were made to help one another.” “Okay.” “Do you want a taste of milk?” “Okay?” “Open your mouth….” I looked at him quizzically, and he laughed. “Just do it, honey. I promise, you’ll like it.” I opened my mouth, and without warning, he shot a stream of milk into my mouth. I was surprised it could shoot so far. It was kind of warm, but in a sweet sort of way, it tasted better than when we had it at the table. “Did you like it?” “I did.” He smiled. “We’ll bring the milk in, and then check on the chickens, then.” “Okay.” I walked around behind Uncle Sean for a long while, and he milked the cows, gathered eggs, put the cows to pasture, fed the chickens and then the pigs, and he brought me where he kept the horses. “How close have you ever been to a horse?” Uncle Sean asked. “I don’t know,” I looked down. “Here, honey,” and he handed me an apple. “I don’t want you just giving them apples or sugar whenever,” he told me. “Not until you know what you are doing, but if I hand you one to give them, then you can.” I smiled. “Why?” “Well, just like kids need to watch that they don’t eat too much sugar, horses need to watch what they eat, too. Apples are good for them in small amounts, and they like the taste of sugar, but these should not be overfed to them.” “Okay.” “Hold the apple out to her,” he pointed out a brown and white horse whose pattern was hard to describe. “That’s called a painted mare. I call her Patty.” The horse was a lot taller than me, and as she came near, I backed up a step or two. “She won’t hurt you,” Uncle Sean put his strong hands on my shoulders to steady me. “Just show her the apple, sweetheart. That’s all she wants.” I held it out, and closed my eyes turning my head to the side. I squealed as the wet tongue touched my hand, but then the weight of the apple was gone, and I peeked an eye open to see the horse chewing on the apple, the whole thing in its mouth. “She just took the whole apple,” I exclaimed looking back at Uncle Sean. “She did, didn’t she?” I looked up at her, and her big black eyes looked back at me. “She’s very beautiful,” I said to Uncle Sean. “But she kind of smells.” “Well, she’s a horse,” he told me. “All animals have distinctive smells, and when you are not used to those smells, then you think they stink.” “Do animals think I stink?” I asked him. “Maybe,” he smiled. “But most animals don’t mind your smell as much. They smell for something alerting them to danger, and your smells are not dangerous to farm animals.” “Oh. Then what scares them?” “Well, some animals are scared of the smell of guns, but mostly, they are always on alert for animals that eat them.” “Oh. But don’t humans eat cows and pigs?” “Pigs that have been born and raised on a farm are not really aware of that,” Uncle Sean told me. “Humans have been able to realize that if we kill the ones we eat out of sight of the herd, the rest of them don’t realize what we are doing until it’s too late.” I frowned. “So we cheat.” He laughed. “I suppose we do. But in nature, every animal uses its instinct to get an advantage over each other, and that allows the populations to balance out. Without hunters, the land would get crowded pretty fast.” “Oh,” I looked up at him. I guess what he said made sense even if I didn’t like that humans pretended to be pigs and cows friends just so it was easier to kill them for food. “Well, animals should try to trick us, then to be fair.” “Oh, they do,” Uncle Sean said. “Their colors are no accident, and many animals know how to use their colors to hide. Snakes, for example, often are the colors of the grass and trees around them so they aren’t bothered by larger predators, including humans, and sometimes, they strike from hiding, and you could be bit before you knew a snake was there.” I frowned. I had never seen a snake on our property. “Maybe if we left the animal’s lands alone, snakes wouldn’t sneak up on us.” “Maybe,” Uncle Sean smiled at me. “But a lot of times, we don’t know where animals are living until we’ve put up houses, and again, if they go unchecked, then there would be no place for humans at all.” I sighed. Maybe I didn’t understand this stuff that well. I just knew that it was unfair that humans tricked animals and then killed them. Uncle Sean had been putting a blanket and some stuff on Patty as he talked to me. Before I knew it, I was being lifted up on the horse, and then Uncle got up behind me. “Just hold the front part,” he told putting my hands on the saddle thing. “That part is called the saddle horn. I’m right here behind you, and I’ve got you,” he held me with both of his hands. The ropes that I thought directed the horse left and right were tied around the horn thing, too. “How are you going to steer?” I asked. “Patty knows where she’s going,” Uncle told me. “Don’t worry.” The horse walked lazily along with us on her while the other three horses that Uncle had were a little faster getting out to the field. “Sitting all the way down on your butt is going to give you a sore one,” Uncle Sean told me. “You have to hover down and rock along with the rhythm of the horse. It’s more comfortable for Patty, and it’s going to hurt a lot less for you.” “Oh, okay.” We just walked Patty around a bit, and Uncle Sean held on to me. It was fun riding her even though at first, I was a little bit scared because we sat up higher than I expected, and when she walked, it felt like we were riding a wave a little bit, going up and down as she walked. “You have horses, don’t you?” Uncle Sean asked me. “We do, but I never get to ride them. No one actually rides them. Daddy says that’s not what they are for.” Uncle Sean frowned. “I see.” My tummy felt a little bit like swishing water, but I didn’t tell Uncle Sean yet. I didn’t want to make trouble. I’m a big girl. I can wait. We eventually brought Patty around the fence that led to the pasture, and then Uncle Sean helped me off. He got off, and he unsaddled her and let her go off with all the stuff draped over the fence. “We should go back to the horse coral, and clean it up for them.” I smiled up at Uncle Sean. “Okay.” “We have to keep it clean everyday or the animals will get sick,” he told me as we walked back the way we come from bringing Patty out. “It’s hard work though. You might be better in the house playing.” “No. I want to help.” “Okay. Just stay close then.” I want to be a big girl and show everyone that I can do what my sisters do. We walked into the little coral area that was like an oval with a funny little stone floor, and in the center, there was like a little barred off area that you could step down into. The entirety of that floor space was so dirty, I wasn’t sure the point of trying to clean it, but Uncle started to spray it with water from a hose. “Why’s it so dirty in here?” I asked, and I had to raise my voice twice to be heard over the spaying against the stone. “Dirty?” Uncle Sean squatted down and looked into my eyes. “Honey, this is where the horses are kept over night. It’s going to get dirty because they don’t have toilets like humans. You did know that, didn’t you?” “I guess. I just thought…,” but I paused because I hadn’t really thought at all. I did wonder what the animals did in the barn when they were left there for long periods. “Do you want a turn with the hose?” Uncle Sean asked. “Okay.” It was kind of fun spraying the hose, but I kind of had to walk around a little and put one leg in front of the other tightly. I had been waiting for a bit, but I wanted to show I could do it. I could wait. We passed the hose off to one another as we sprayed the place down with water, and then Uncle Sean got this really long handled push broom with a wide head with stiff brushes, and he started to push the dirty water towards one end, where I saw the drain. I watched for a bit, expecting he would hand it back to me eventually and let me do it, too, but slowly time moved, and he pushed against it hard and I could see him moving a great volume of water at once. He didn’t seem to be going to hand it off to me, and the work was so taxing, it looked like he stopped watching me. With a sigh, I walked out of the main area and through the part that went out looking for another push broom. I didn’t see one though as I came outside, and I started to realize I better go to the bathroom soon. Maybe I’ll see a broom on my way back to the house. I thought Uncle Sean wasn’t watching for me, but boy was I wrong! I walked through the bare area that had no grass, and seemed like just a hard dirt surface towards the gates that let us back where the animals were. There were some other little places for animals, and I peeked in at the little spaces there for a broom. All the animals were in the fields now. I had to close my knees suddenly and grip down at my pants. I had to pee really bad. I wondered if maybe I just peed on the floor where the animals had already went, then it might not be bad? There was already pee there, and I really had to go. “Sammy!” I heard Uncle Sean calling to me. I didn’t answer him though because I wanted to pee. I went further into one of the little cubby areas, and looked at the floor and thought if this was really a good idea, and as I was thinking, I happened to look up and against the wall, there was a broom. I walked over to the broom, still wondering about maybe going back into the house to go pee. “There you are!” Uncle Sean suddenly made me jump a little as he caught me in my little space just before I decided to pull down my pants. “What are you going out her off on your own?” “I just…,” I showed him the broom. “No, Sammy. No.” He looked really mad. “You can’t just run off like that! Do you hear me? You are not to ever wander off without telling me when we are out here!” I looked up at him, kind of scared because his face was red, and he was shaking, I think with anger. He step towards me. “Do you hear me?” I dropped the broom as I watched him, kind of shaking a little bit. “You are to never run off when you are helping with the animals,” he said again, raising his voice. “We talked about this! What if you fell into something?” I started to feel a little bit of pee leak into my pants causing me to tear up, though I was kind of scared, too. I put my hands against my pants harder to try to stop the pee. He came closer, and I thought he was going to hit me. “Sammy! I told you,” his voice was still a bit rough and scary and loud. “Some of the animals are dangerous, and there are other things out here that are not people friendly!” I felt the pee push into my hands as I peed my pants. He suddenly reached out for me, and I blocked my face which made him see my disgrace. My darkened pants were getting soaked. He sighed. “Baby, even if you gotta pee, you can’t run off like that,” but his voice seemed to calm down finally. “I’m not mad because you just ran off,” he told me. “I was scared. I didn’t know where you got to. I thought you went to the house, but you weren’t there!” I looked down as the rest of the pee drizzled out of me adding to the puddle on the floor. “I’m sorry.” He picked me up and started to carry me. “Come on. We should go get you some clean pants on,” he told me. “It’s about time for lunch anyway.” I looked into his eyes as he held me. “I… I peed,” I sniffled. “You did,” he whispered back to me. “But that’s not as important as you being safe. You could have told me you were going to find a place to go.” “I… I was looking for that,” I pointed at the broom. “I was going to hold it until you brought me back to the house. I just wanted to help.” He rubbed my back as he held me. “Baby, even if you were looking for a broom, next time, you need to tell me if you leave my sight. I just don’t want anything to happen to you. Understand?” I nodded. “Now you think I’m a baby.” He squatted down and let me on my feet. “Why would I think that?” “I just peed my pants. You must think I’m a liar.” He shook his head. “I think you just held it too long, honey. With your behavior the last couple of days, it doesn’t surprise me that you’ve done this now, but not when we are carefully watching you.” “So, you do think I’m a baby and that I can’t be trusted?” He sighed. “I think some people taught you some bad habits. Those habits caused this, not you being a baby or lying.” I looked down. “I mean it, Sammy. You have a right to use the bathroom, and don’t need to wait until you are wiggling around here, but when we are in the animals’ area, you do need to let me know where you’ll be so I know where to find you. You could get hurt.” “Okay.” A tear ran down my cheek. He wiped my tear with his thumb. “Let’s take you into the house and get you some clean pants, okay?” “Okay.” I thought he’d just take my hand now, but no, he picked me up again. Paying no mind that the way he was holding me, I was definitely getting his clothes wet, he brought me to the door where he put me down so he could open it. I looked up at him with a sad smile. I was sad that I made him worried and that I peed my pants, but he seemed to really care about me. “Go up and wash yourself off,” Uncle told me. “Then put some clean things on, and I’ll get your lunch ready, okay?” “Okay.

I'll double check my wording and see if there is a way to fix it later to make it more clear. I don't have time right now, but I do appreciate you pointing out that there is some ambiguity in the description that needs to be fixed.

No, she was born eight years ago. The boy was already four at the time, so no, he's four years older than her. She's actually almost nine, though, so actually he'd only be three years and some change older than her. He had died nearly eight years ago, and he was four years old at the time. She was just born a bit before that. That's also why she didn't realize she had had a cousin. By the time she visited them the last time, the boy had already been gone.

Chapter Four: The Unspoken I saw Aunt Shelley wipe her hands and walk over supportive-like towards Uncle Sean as he talked on the phone. “It’s Olive-Spots,” Uncle Sean was saying in the phone. “She’s not eating since yesterday afternoon, and she was lying down. Please come and look at her as soon as you can.” Aunt’s hand rubbed his shoulder as he talked. I was still working on the pickled onions while I heard them. He hung up the phone, but before he could rush out, Aunt Shelley held him and whispered. “She’s done this before, right?” “She has, but I’ve done what the vet suggested over the last two days. Nothing I’m doing is helping.” “She’ll be fine,” Aunt Shelley told him. “She will.” Uncle Sean looked over at me, working on the pickled onions, and I looked down. “I know she’s just a baby cow,” he told me. “You probably don’t understand, but she’s still a life, honey.” I nodded. I did understand. I had a rabbit once. Well, not one that my parents knew about, of course. They would never have approved because daddy says rabbits eat your stuff when you aren’t looking, but I took care of it for a while. Then, daddy shot it. I looked sadly up at Uncle Sean. “She’s your baby though,” I told him. “She’s the youngest animal in your babies back there, right?” He smiled. “Well, your Aunt Shelley is right. The doctor is on his way. He’ll figure it out.” And with that, he walked off through the back door. “I told you, honey,” Aunt Shelley sat back down and put me in her lap again. “Your uncle takes it personal, even if it’s not his baby. All the animals back there are like his children.” I nodded. The rabbit was like mine. Sighing, I told Auntie. “I had a rabbit once that daddy killed. He didn’t know about it, but he found Mr. whiskers eating a carrot that I gave him, and he had shot it while I was at school. When I checked on him, that’s when I knew something happened. It was just left there, not taken care of or anything.” Auntie Shelley rocked me. “You may have more in common with Sean that we thought, then,” she told me. “But why didn’t you tell your mama about the rabbit?” “I asked her if I could keep a rabbit when I first started to look after it, but daddy was there. He said rabbits were trouble, and it would eat all our food. The only rabbit there would be on our property, if he knew about it, would be a dead one, so I didn’t tell them about my baby.” “Oh, you poor child.” Suddenly, she noticed the jars on the table. I had already done five of them while she was trying to be there for Uncle Sean. “Wow, you did that many already?” she asked me. I nodded. “Mrs. Vingt is going to be overfilled with joy. That’s going to be at least five extra jars than I normally give her!” I smiled. “You can take a break if you want,” Aunt Shelley told me. “I don’t want to,” I pouted a little bit. “Okay, well, I want you to take a minute,” she said as she lifted me from the table. I looked up at her when she helped me out of my seat, and she took me by the hand. “What are we doing?” “I’m taking you potty,” she told me. “Not because I don’t trust you, but because you’ve been squirming a bit for the last few minutes we were sitting. You don’t have to sit there and hold it just because you want to help me, honey.” I looked down. I wasn’t sure if she was mad, and I wasn’t sure if I should have controlled myself a little better. “You are always looking for excuses to put your homework aside, aren’t you?” mom would scold me. “You just started your homework! Stop playing around and do it.” Aunt Shelley sighed when she saw tears in my eyes just outside the toilet door. “Are you wet?” she asked me. “No, ma’am. I can hold it.” She sighed and opened the bathroom door for me. “Well, go ahead and go, sweetie. You’ll feel bad if you have an accident.” A few minutes later, we were back down in the kitchen, and Aunt Shelley had me in her lap again, and we were doing the onions again. She touched my nose when I tried to apologize for making trouble, and I promised her I could have waited longer, but she kept changing the topic to how I was doing with the onions, and she kept saying how proud she was of me. “I really could have waited a lot longer,” I whispered to her as she was working on her own jar. “Now, remember, close the jar lid tight,” she ignored what I said on purpose. “That’s a good girl. You are so much help to me.” “I promise, I wouldn’t have peed my pants,” I tried to tell her. “Honey, no one said you would have,” she patted my lap. “But pickling things requires your full attention, sweetheart. You shouldn’t pickle things when you have other important issues going on. If you are hungry, you need to eat before you start pickling. If you are thirsty, you need water to drink while you work. If you need the toilet, you don’t have to sit there and squirm. You just go, wash your hands, and come back to it.” “Oh. Daddy likes us to finish a task before we leave the table for any reason, especially if we are doing something like homework or something.” “Well, I can’t tell your parents how to parent at your own home, but here, we have different expectations,” she told me. “Besides, this isn’t a job for you. It’s something fun. Sean and I told your dad when you were put with us, that you are not going to be put to work. If at anytime, you don’t want to do the pickling or anything else I am asking you to do, you just say the word. This summer is your summer to relax and to do fun things.” I smiled. I did like pickling with her. “Even if I was putting you to work though,” Aunt Shelley patted my knee. “I would never expect you to sit there, squirming like you were. That’s wrong, honey, and if he does that to you and your sisters, then I wonder if your older sisters and yourself are peeing your clothes at home. If you were…,” she studied me for a moment. “I know, you don’t sweetie. But if you were, it would be his fault, not yours.” I sighed and looked down. I wasn’t a baby. I could hold it. I liked it that she didn’t want me to hold it, but I could. I don’t want her to think I’m a baby. Maybe I should try harder not to wiggle. Mama says that we wiggle too much sometimes at the table. Aunt Shelley and I had just finished the last jar of pickles when there was a chime at the door. “That will be the vet,” she told me. “Will you go answer the door, and if you see a man with a back bag and brown hair turning gray in a brown suit at the door, let him in. I have to go get Sean.” I nodded. Opening the door, I looked up at a heavy man who had a bushy beard, but he had the black bag and the brown hair, and he had the brown suit on, so I let him in. “Aunt Shelley said to let you in. She’s getting Uncle Sean right now.” “I see. And who are you, child?” “My mom is cousins with my Aunt, and Uncle Sean is her husband, so ….” “I see. You are pretty polite.” I smiled. The backdoor opened pretty soon, and Uncle Sean came in ahead of Aunt Shelley, and rubbing me on the head, he led passed by me and started to talk to the doctor. “Come on,” Aunt Shelley reached out for my hand. “We should do something about the upstairs hall and your bedroom.” I followed her, glad I didn’t have to think about the poor calf. If it was going to die, I’d rather not know, I thought. Aunt Shelley had retrieve her hoover, an upright vacuum cleaner from a closet near the bathroom, and she asked me to plug it in, which I happily did. “It’s an old machine,” she told me. “You have to be careful with it. So we pick up anything large, metal, or problematic for it at first.” “Okay.” I saw her starting to move it back and forth over the floor. It looked kind of fun, but I didn’t ask her for a turn. She said it was old, and I didn’t want to break it. “Sweetheart, do you want a turn to try?” she suddenly asked me. I looked up at her wondering if I should say yes or not. If I broke it…. “Sammy? Did you hear, honey? Do you want a go?” she had asked and this time with the machine turned off. I could only shrug because I did want a go, but I didn’t want to break it. She smiled and put a hand over mine, and then turned it on. She directed me a bit, and I smiled up at her, and she smiled back. “That’s a girl,” she encouraged me. “You are getting the hang of it.” I started to dance, I don’t know why, and Aunt Shelley backed off a little letting me control the vacuum while I danced. I was still moving it like she said, but my body was shaking around, and I was really having fun. We moved together while she showed me how she wanted the whole hallway done all the way from her room down to my room. Then she unplugged it. “You are a natural,” she said to me. “I couldn’t have done any better. Look at that floor. It’s so clean!” I couldn’t help but have a huge grin as she said that about me. We went into my room, and she pulled the blankets off my bed. I told her that morning I didn’t pee in the bed. But she took the blankets off anyway, and then she took the sheets off, but they were clean. “I didn’t wet the bed, I promise,” I told her. “No one says you did, sweetheart,” she smiled. “I just like to change the sheets everyday.” I looked into her eyes wondering if that’s what she really thought, or if she just didn’t want to say that she believed I peed all the time anyway. “Sweetheart,” she pulled me towards her and into a hug. “Children sleep better on clean sheets than they do on the same ones for days at a time. I don’t care if you pee in your sleep or not, or how often, I’m always going to try to change your sheets everyday. That’s part of taking care of a child. You mother doesn’t do it?” I shrugged. “Well, I dare say, with five kids, she might not have enough sheets to change your beds everyday, and didn’t you tell me she forgot to change your bedding even when she knew you peed because she wasn’t feeling well lately?” I nodded. “She did.” “Well, I only have one child to look after right now, and I’m not pregnant, okay? So, you’ll excuse me for wanting to take better care of you since I can?” I smiled. “Okay.” “Now, no more accusing me of just doing things because you might be wet. Not everything I do has to do with you being wet. If I honestly thought you had peed this morning, I would have put you in the bath, and that’s the truth, sweetheart.” I looked up and saw that though she smiled, there were other lines on her face that pronounced her seriousness. “You don’t let children go around in filth if you know they’ve peed their pants or the bed or whatever,” she told me. “That’s why I had you clean up last night before I put you back to bed.” “Okay.” Aunt Shelley then helped me vacuum my room, and she opened the closet a little wider, and I saw some boxed up things in there, neatly wrapped with packing tape keeping them closed. “I have some things I’d like you to look through,” she told me. “Would you please go sit on the bed?” I walked over to the bed and sat down, and then she came over with one of the boxes, and set it between us as she sat down, too. “It’s been awhile since I’d had these things opened,” she said tears in her eyes. “Why?” I asked. “I can’t really talk about that right now, honey. It’s not a secret, it’s just hard to talk about.” I nodded. “Okay.” She pulled the tape off the closed box, and the flaps started to be pushed up from what was inside. I smelled the age of the box for it must have been in the closet for at least ten years. “Go ahead,” she smiled at me. “Reach in and get something.” I felt my hand shaking, not because I was scared or anything, but because this box somehow felt special to Aunt Shelley. Time seemed to stand still as my hand inched towards the flaps. I didn’t know what was in the box, but the look on my Auntie Shelley’s face told me that it was really special. My hand passed over the partially raised cardboard, and I pulled it up. Shaking. I pulled up the second flap. My Aunt seemed to move a bit in her seat as she watched. I pulled up the other two flaps, and then I looked in. A rather large pink rabbit with sparkling blue eyes peeked out of it. Its ears hung down around its face. It was so big, that when I had it out of the box, and put it in my lap, its head came up to my chin. I hugged it. “It’s so adorable,” I squealed. “How long have you had it?” “It’s been in that box for the last eight years,” Auntie said with a sad tone in her voice. “It’s been waiting for someone special and I…. I’ve had a hard time letting it go, but I couldn’t look at it for a long time.” I knew there was more, but she didn’t stop to explain. She went back to the closet and brought out another box, putting this one on the floor. I left the pink rabbit on the bed, and I got on the floor, and started to pull the tape off that box. The box was musty smelling and a bit old. I wondered what these toys were from. Eight years ago, she wouldn’t have been a child. They couldn’t be her toys…. I opened it, and peeking inside, I saw brown, red, green, and blue geometric wood blocks. It was almost like Christmas to me. I looked up at her and she still had tears that were actually slipping down her thin wrinkled face, but a smile was still plastered on her face. Even if these things were not from her being a child, I could tell they were special to her, and she was letting me into them. I tried to pour the box out, but it was so heavy with all the blocks in it, I couldn’t even tip it over. There had to be a million blocks in it. And even as I tried to get the blocks out, all of them, Auntie Shelley was bringing over more boxes from the closet. I saw her looking more and more sadly at the things as I saw her bring them over, and then she knelt down next to me. “Open all the boxes, please?” I nodded. I didn’t know why she wanted me to do it, but I did. There were other stuffed animals, some toy cars, one toy water gun, a toy gun that shot plastic disc things, and there were toy tools and a doctor bag. Over all, I could gather that while there were toys that I was interested in within all of this stuff, it was really stuff that must have belonged to a boy, maybe around my age. “Where did you get this stuff?” I asked her finally. “They were…,” she sniffled. “...my son’s things.” “Mom never said you had children.” She nodded and stood up. “Well, you go ahead and play. I want to go down and get an early start on dinner. I saw her stand up, and she just walked quietly out of the room. I looked around at everything. She was so sad and had packed everything so carefully away all this time, did she say about eight years? I wondered how she kept it so well all that time. I found myself dragging Mr. Ivory and the rabbit with me down the stairs not long after she had gone off. I had the pink rabbit by its ear, as I dragged it into the kitchen, and I saw her setting a metal pail down and getting ready to peel the potatoes. I drug it further in, and sat the two toys together in one chair, and then I sat in the chair closer to auntie. “Can I do it, too?” I asked looking at the potatoes she had out. “I thought you’d be playing,” she gave a sad sort of chuckle. “I will, I promise,” I told her. “But I want to help, if that’s okay.” “I’d appreciate the help,” she said. “You hung onto the rabbit’s ears just the same as he would have done.” I knew she must have been talking about her missing boy, wherever he was. “Good girl,” she said as I took a seat. She handed me a potato, and I started. I loved helping her. Uncle Sean came in through the kitchen with the doctor. “Your calf will be fine,” the doctor told Uncle. “Just make sure to do as I said for a few days, and call me immediately if you notice anything else wrong.” “I will,” Sean sounded happy, that is, until he noticed the rabbit in the chair. He looked a bit saddened by it, but he saw the doctor out. When Uncle Sean came to the table and stood by Aunt Shelley, he sighed. “So, you finally brought the toys out?” “I did,” Aunt Shelley said. “She’s only had the one Stuffed toy for the last two days. The toys are not doing anyone any good locked away in boxes, are they?” “No, I suppose not,” Uncle Sean said. “And maybe Toby will love to look down from wherever he is, and see his beloved things being played with again.” Aunt Shelley nodded. “Toby?” I asked looking up from where I was peeling potatoes. “He was our son,” Uncle Sean put his hands comforting around Aunt Shelley’s shoulders and started to massage her. “He was four years old when he died, nearly eight years ago.” “So, he was like four years older than me?” I asked. Aunt Shelley nodded a tear ran down her cheek again and she sniffled. “I’m so sorry. Are you sure? I don’t have to touch your baby’s things,” I told her. “I’ve always only ever had Mr. Ivory for like the last two years.” “No,” Uncle Sean frowned. “No, Shelley was right to finally bring the toys out. They need to get some use, and somehow, I think Toby is smiling knowing that they are being shared with the world again.” I looked down. “I’ll be really careful with them.” “No,” Uncle Sean told me. “Don’t be careful with them. Think like that, and we might as well box them up again. Play with them, honey. Toby wants it. I know he does with all my heart. We want it, and it will help Shelley, I promise.” I nodded. We ate dinner, and unlike at home, they encouraged me to leave the rabbit and Mr. Ivory in the chair at the table. “Mommy says that games and toys don’t go at the table,” I told them. “Well, just this once,” Uncle Sean said. “It makes both of us happy to have the rabbit and the Rhinoceros at the table. It’s like we really have a kid at the table again.” I smiled. “Now, we’ll have you get a bath after dinner,” Uncle Sean told me. “Then you can take some toys to the living room, or you can play in the bedroom, as you like.” I smiled shyly looking down. “It would make a mess if I played in the living room.” “And a very welcomed mess, it would be,” Aunt Shelley said with a smile. “I’d love for you to make a little bit of a mess with the toys in the living room, if you were having fun and playing with them.” I looked from her to Uncle Sean. “Really?” “Yes, baby,” Uncle Sean whispered across the table to me. “We want to see a child playing in the living room, and help us feel a little bit young again. Can you do that for us?” I smiled. “I can.” “Good girl,” Uncle Sean said. I didn’t really understand how I was doing anything for them by playing in the living room and making a mess, and why I was a good girl for spreading the blocks all over the floor, but Uncle Sean said it again when I started playing. I was making a large block castle in the middle of the living room, something that even if we had blocks at home, I would never have dreamed of having the audacity of thinking I could get away with such a thing. Not only was I making a mess with the blocks, but I had the big pink rabbit there next to me, and I had Mr. Ivory. Uncle Sean was watching television in his nice chair not more than a few feet from where I was working, and Aunt Shelley was in the kitchen cleaning up. “I could go help Aunt Shelley,” I told Uncle Sean. “Don’t you dare, honey,” he said looking over at me. “It’s play time, now. You’ve been working and helping out all day long, and we want you to get some of your creativity and energy out before bedtime.” “I’ve never been forced to play before, especially with toys,” I told Uncle Sean. “Honey, I’m not trying to force you to play…, I mean, not the way you made that sound. It’s just…, it’s not natural for a kid not to be playing all the time. How can you grow up to be a decent thinking human being if you can’t live some of your fantasies out through play?” I frowned. I had never heard of anyone using that argument before. It felt a little weird to have someone argue for playtime, and yet, I kind of liked having actual playtime. “Am I allowed to go to the toilet during playtime?” I asked Uncle Sean. “What?” he asked sounding a bit shocked I’d asked that. “I mean…, how long should I hold it?” He shook his head and stood up. “Come on, baby.” I looked up at him. “You need the toilet, don’t you, love?” I looked down. “Sweetheart, please stand up.” I stood up and looked up where he gently reached under my arms and lifted me up. “You are a big girl,” he whispered to me as he got hold of me and put his arms under me so that I was supported. “You don’t have to ask to use the bathroom when you are in the house all the time. You just go, sweetheart.” But even as he said that, he was carrying me. “I’m taking Sammy to the toilet,” Uncle Sean told Shelley. “I’m not sure what the deal is with her, but it seems she wasn’t sure if she was allowed to go.” “Again?” Aunt Shelley asked as he stood there, me in his arms. “Again?” Uncle Sean repeated back to Shelley. “Well, she nearly peed herself at the table earlier while we were canning, and she apologized and said she could hold it longer…. It’s like she doesn’t know if she’s allowed to go or something.” “I swear,” Sean frowned as he held me, and I started to squirm. “If I find out this is why they accuse her of pissing her pants, I’m going to become a bit irate at that cousin of yours and her husband.” I whimpered as I tried really hard to close my legs, but they were around Uncle Sean, and he wasn’t exactly the thinnest person I’d been held by. “Well, get her to the toilet,” Aunt Shelley told him. “If you don’t, she’s going to pee all over you.” He smiled. “Well, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if she did.” And he carried me towards the steps, and unlike Aunt Shelley, he did carry me all the way up the steps and didn’t put me down until we were in front of the door to the toilet. “Honey, are you scared to go by yourself?” he asked me as he put me on my feet. “If you were scared to go up her alone, I can stand by the door and leave it open for you.” I smiled up at him. “I’m not scared.” “Okay, then. I’ll just let you go and you can come back down and play after you are….” “Actually, would it be okay if you leave the door open and wait by it?” I asked suddenly not really sure why I asked him since I wasn’t really scared. “Of course,” he patted me on the butt. “But get to the toilet before you get embarrassed, okay?” I smiled and ran to the toilet, but before I started to pull my pants down, I looked over and I saw Uncle Sean, his back to the door, but the door open. I liked to see him standing there, guarding the door. It kind of made me feel… well, I wasn’t really sure what to say. I know I should have told him to leave. I’m a big kid, but it was so nice. I wanted him to stay there and especially since he didn’t mind. I got on the toilet and started to go like I was supposed to. I don’t pee my pants in the daytime. I told them the truth. I don’t do it. I think he heard me peeing in the toilet, but I didn’t mind. I probably wouldn’t even care if he turned around and watched, or even if came over and put a comforting hand on me while I went, but I didn’t dare ask him to go that far. He had his back to me, and he was guarding the door, and I really loved that he was doing that for me. Somehow, I did feel a little more safe with him there, though I never thought I was scared. I scooted off of the toilet, and I think he heard me flush because while it was pushing the water down, he asked me in a voice that sort of surprised me, and sort made me think he was kind of mad at first. “Baby, you didn’t wipe.” I looked over to him. But I did wipe. I said. “I did.” He sighed and came over to me, I was just about to pull my clothes up. “Honey, no.” he said putting his hands on my arms stopping me pulling up my pants. “Do me a favor and wipe your private again, and then show me the toilet paper.” I frowned up at him, but I did. I pulled a little off like I was supposed to, but when I did, he frowned. “Honey, what are you doing?” “Getting ready to wipe like you said.” “With like a square or two?” he asked. “How do you expect your fingers not to get pee on them?” I looked up at him. Was he telling me to waste toilet paper? “Baby, look, you need to take your little hands and do this,” he said, and he helped me get some toilet paper, by making me wrap the toilet paper around my hand twice, and then he laid it out for me, and ordered me. “Wipe.” I did what he said and pulled it out and looked at it while he looked. “I see pee on the toilet paper,” he told me. “You see it, don’t you?” I looked down, and it was wet and kind of smelled. “Honey, I don’t know who taught you to wipe like you did, but you are going to smell all the time and get sick if you don’t get yourself clean. You wipe your privates until you are dry when you pee, and you wipe your butt until it doesn’t look brown when you poop.” I nodded, feeling tears coming to my eyes. “Sweetheart, I’m not mad at you. I just don’t understand your parents having never taught you before. It’s no wonder everyone thinks you pee your pants all the time.” He put me on the toilet. “Wipe, sweetheart,” and then he bent down and pulled off my pants and panties. He looked in them and then showed me. “See? Everyone thinks you pee your pants because you aren’t wiping good. It’s not your fault, but you need to start doing a better job of it, okay?” I nodded. “I’m sorry,” I felt emotional and started to cry. He sighed and threw my kind of wet nickers at the floor by the tub, and then he put his arms around me, and he whispered to me. “There, there, honey. It’s not your fault. I can’t believe no one has ever taught you before, baby.” He took some toilet paper, and he handed me some more. He whispered. “Try again, honey. We want you clean, okay?” I nodded. Aunt Shelley was at the door when I looked over, and she was frowning. “I’m sorry,” Uncle Sean said to Aunt Shelley. “She asked me to stay, and then she tried to get off the toilet without wiping properly, and when I told her to try again, she barely pulled any paper off the roll at all. It was no wonder she didn’t get herself clean. Honestly, if she’s wiping like this, I can see why people think she’s peeing herself.” “Okay,” Aunt Shelley frowned. “Well, I’m just teaching her to wipe,” he told her. “Someone has to do it. The poor child has been trying so hard to be good, and to not be wet, and here we find out, she’s not wiping properly. If they won’t let her wipe properly, then I don’t get why it’s a big deal to them if she pees herself. It raises the same health concerns.” Aunt Shelley sighed. “I know. But she’s crying. Maybe….” “Maybe what?” Uncle Sean asked. “She had to learn that this was not acceptable at some point. I am sorry she’s crying, but I’m not sorry for teaching her the truth about how to take care of herself.” He picked me up and he smiled into my teary face. “Baby, why didn’t you use the proper amount of toilet paper to start with?” “I didn’t want to waste your stuff,” I said still whiny. “It’s not wasting it to use it properly,” he told me. “If we feed you, you eat until you are full, honey. If you use the toilet, you use it right and use all the toilet paper you need to get yourself cleaned up.” “I… I was never allowed to use more than I showed you before.” He sighed and looked at Aunt Shelley. “We are not sending her back to that man if she is scared of keeping herself clean,” he told her. “This isn’t right.” “But what can we do. If we just kept her, it would be kidnapping.” He rubbed his head. “Well, I guess we cross that bridge when we get to it. For right now, we have about three months to teach her to do things right.” Aunt Shelley nodded. “Baby, I don’t care if I asked you to play or to do anything else,” Uncle Sean was still holding me, naked waist down and he looked into my eyes. “No matter what we are asking you to do, you have a right to use the toilet. If we don’t want you going off on your own, then you can at least ask us to go, right? And if you do pee some in your panties if you get scared to go, you can tell your Aunt and me. We will never shame you for something like that, okay?” “I don’t go in the daytime in my pants,” I told him again. “No, I’m sure you don’t,” he told me. “But people do make you hold it sometimes, don’t they?” I looked up at him. “Honey, you asked me if you were allowed to go while you were playing. Shelley and I talk, and I know at least twice, Shelley caught you squirming around because you had to go, but didn’t know you were allowed to go.” I looked down. “I’ll try not to squirm next time. I promise, I don’t pee my pants.” He shook his head. “Honey, if you gotta go, you go ahead and squirm. I’m not mad at all about the squirming. Children squirm when they are nervous, and if you are holding your pee pee a while, then of course you are going to get nervous. Like you said, you don’t pee your pants, so it gets scary when it gets close to trying to come out and you don’t think you are allowed to go.” I looked down. “Honey, you don’t need to try to hold it like that in this house. Even if it starts going in your pants, we won’t be upset, honey. But better than waiting until you are squirming, how about you try to go as soon as you think you have to go, or if you are scared, just ask us.” “But when you are talking….” “Baby, if you are already squirming, then you go ahead and try to interrupt us. You have a right to tell us if you have a need like that, and if we shush you or think something else is more important, and don’t pay attention soon enough, then you will not be in trouble for peeing your pants, okay?” I nodded. “I understand.” He smiled and carried me to the tub. “Actually, you need a bath, anyway,” he told me. “Can I undress you the rest of the way?” I sighed and looked down. “She is a little old to be undressed by her uncle,” Aunt Shelley told him. “Perhaps you are right. I can leave her to you.” When Uncle Sean left the bathroom, Aunt Shelley smiled at me. “Honey, take off your shirt, okay?” I did so while she ran the bath. “Sean was right, though, sweetheart. You need to learn to better take care of yourself. You are going to be nine soon, and it’s not being a big girl to hold it when there is no purpose to doing so. Honestly, it’s probably healthier to just pee your pants than to hold it as long as you are doing, you know?” I looked down. “I can’t just wet my pants. I’d get in real trouble then.” Aunt Shelley made a cold face for just a moment, and then she smiled at me. “Well, I’m not so sure Sean is going to let you go back to that kind of life. You heard him. Honestly, if your dad is like that, I’d be surprised if all your sisters aren’t pissing their pants from time to time.” “They don’t,” I said. “I’m the only one that does it in my sleep.” She sighed. “Well, now, would you do me a big favor anyway?” I nodded. I liked her. I’d do anything she asked. “From now on, if you are squirming enough that I notice and send you to the bathroom, will you please change your panties from now on when I send you to the toilet?” “That would make more work for you,” I mumbled. “Not as much work as it would make for me if you got an infection because of wearing panties that you got a little bit damp.” “Damp? But I don’t pee my pants.” “No, honey, you don’t pee your pants,” Aunt Shelley agreed again with me. “But that doesn’t mean some doesn’t leak out with as much as you squirm around. I saw you squirming at the table, and Sean caught you squirming in the living room. I don’t see how your panties can’t get a little damp with you squirming like that, sweetheart.” “But I don’t pee my pants.” “No, baby, you don’t,” she said and then hugged me. “Still, just change your panties for me? I promise I won’t check to see if you changed them, and I won’t bring up you peeing your pants at all, because I know you don’t feel anything come out. I know you don’t pee them.” I wasn’t sure, but it felt like she was saying I was wetting on accident and not knowing I was doing it, but I wasn’t sure. Sometimes, I did feel a little bit wet after I went to the toilet. I wasn’t sure. Maybe I was leaking a little bit when I tried to hold it…. Aunt Shelley helped me into the tub, and she gave me a rag. “I’m going to go ahead and wash your back and your hair,” she told me. “You’re a big girl. Do you remember how I cleaned you up the other day?” I nodded. “Okay. You do what you remember me doing, and I’ll just start with your back, okay?” Later that night, a castle was spread out in one corner of the living room. I had started to grab three of the blocks to take it down, but Uncle Sean got down there with me, and he took the blocks from my hands. “No, sweetheart. This stays here for the night. You worked had on this and so you can leave it so you can enjoy it tomorrow, too.” He put the three blocks back where he saw me get them from. “I’m not supposed to leave stuff out,” I told him. “This isn’t Dave and Ruth’s house,” he told me with a frown. “This is Sean and Shelley’s house. It’s not going to start the end of the world if you leave your toys out once in a while. You can clean it up tomorrow if the castle doesn’t interest you when you get up, okay?” I smiled. I was in the bedroom, and now, both Uncle Sean and Aunt Shelley were helping me into bed. Aunt Shelley had already put me in a sleeping shirt and a night time panties after my bath earlier, so they had no reason for Uncle Sean not go come to my room. “Baby,” Uncle Sean leaned down and kissed my head. “You are allowed to wet the bed, okay? No one is going to be mad. No one is going to call you names, and no one is going to worry about it come morning. But if you do wet in the night and need help, our room is right down the hall across from your room. You come right to the door and knock on it to make sure we are asleep. We do things that children shouldn’t see, so that’s why we ask you knock first, okay?” “You mean you fuck…,” I started. “Honey,” Uncle Sean got up and left the room, his face really red. Aunt Shelley shook her head and she stood up and walked over to the window. She didn’t look happy. I must have messed up. “Where did you hear a word like that?” Aunt Shelley eventually asked me as she stared out the window. “From daddy when he was in a secret place with a woman that wasn’t mommy.” She frowned. “Did he know you were there?” “He… um… had to bring me. It was one of the times I had ran off and he had to fetch me, and he also had to meet the lady.” She sighed. “Well, please don’t talk about that stuff in our house for a few more years, okay? It’s enough to say that your daddy met someone. We will understand.” “Okay.” “Yes, Sean and I are married. We do things that children shouldn’t see or even know about. The fact you even know…. Honey, you are not going back to that house at the end of the summer.” “What about my sisters?” “I’m not even sure they are in a safe place, either.” “But mom?” “Honey, I don’t know what to promise yet, as to what will happen. The only thing I can promise right now, is that you are not going back to that. If your daddy wants to meet other women, and if your mom doesn’t know, or she doesn’t care, that is one thing. But exposing you to that, that is not something I’m going to tolerate.” “Okay.” She came back to me and kissed me on the cheek. “Baby, please don’t say that word around our house for a while, okay?” “The fuck word?” “Baby, yes, that word. If you have to refer to it at all, just call it the F-word. Please.” “Okay.” “Uncle Sean is not mad at you. It just caught him off guard that your dad can so easily teach you stuff like that before you are ready. It’s stupid of him, baby.” “I love daddy,” I told Shelley. “I know you do. Sometimes, we love people that we care about, but it doesn’t always mean that it’s good to be around them all the time.” I sighed. “He hits you.” I looked down. “He let the school push you roughly into chairs, and squeeze your arm until it bruises.” I nodded. “He’s not safe, sweetheart.” I didn’t know what to think. “Well, you know what, you are probably a bit upset to sleep by yourself right now. Come on….” “Where am I going?” “To our room with us,” Aunt Shelley told me. “You’ve had a bit of a scary realization, and it wouldn’t be proper to put you in bed by yourself after scaring you like this.” I looked up at her. I’ve been scared a lot worse than this before, and I was still expected to sleep in my bed at home. That night, Uncle Sean ended up taking me to the living room with him, and he put me in his lap and rocked me until I fell asleep with him. Then before I knew it, I was waking up in their bed between them. My panties were dry though, and the bed under me was dry. It's going to be a little longer, probably. No one really believes she wets herself here, except at night, though the last chapter did probably hint at something that wasn't known that well to her parents. Well... we'll see what happens. There is definitely talk about what they are thinking about it at the moment, but remember in 1980, it was harder to prove abuse and harder to take kids unless you were just not liked and reported a lot at the time. They live out on a farm, far enough away from neighbors, that... Shelley and Sean would be accused of kidnapping before parents like that would be reported for neglect or abuse.

Chapter Three: Having Problems isn’t Being a Trouble Maker Aunt Shelley had held my hand in one hand, and an empty bucket in the other hand, and we walked out the front door, across the driveway, and then down a grassy field. I was wearing a faded t-shirt that used to be hot pink and had some words on it, but the words were not readable anymore, the shirt seemed more like a red shirt that had been washed so much that it had light pink in it now. It was really dingy. My butt had some black jean shorts on it, and Auntie Shelley had gotten me my regular panties this time. They were a pair of white ones, and with all the times I wet the bed, sometimes I ran out of night time ones, so these had orange and yellow stains all over them. She never said anything about it though. We got to the well, which was no more than a square hole that rested under a giant tree branch, the water coming to the top of the hole, and even threatening to overflow it. The branch of the tree that went over this hole, had a bucket tied to it with a rope, and a ladle hanging closer to where I could get it. “Take the ladle,” Aunt Shelley told me. I looked up at her, and smiled. Was she letting me help her? “Bend down and scoop some water,” she breathed in an even soft voice that was ever comforting to be around. I nodded, and stepped closer to the opening. “Be careful, honey,” she said as she watched me approach the hole that I could now see a concrete step through the somewhat murky water. “It’s deep. You don’t want to fall in.” I smiled up at her. “Okay.” I dipped the ladle in, and then when I looked up at her, she smiled. “Well, go on,” she whispered. “Take a sip, sweetie.” I put the ladle to my lips, and I took a small drink…. “What do you think?” What do I think? I tasted the water. It was really cool for being there exposed to the heat of the day. I wondered how it could stay so cold. Despite being in the elements, and I had had to pick a leaf out of it before taking a sip, I couldn’t believe the taste. It was so fresh… and it had a sweetness that I had never associated with water before. “Well…,” I looked up at her after I swallowed. “It’s… I don’t know…. It’s really good.” She smiled and nodded. “Drink some more?” “Aren’t you scared I’ll wet my pants?” I asked her thinking about how the teachers always accused me of wetting my pants, and recently how daddy was always checking to see, even though I knew I only peed in my sleep. Aunt Shelley frowned. “Pee your pants?” she asked me. “No one said you peed when you were awake, honey. Is there something someone isn’t telling me?” I sighed. She might as well know what everyone thinks. I didn’t want to tell her though. I bit my lip. I didn’t actually do it. But surely when she gets a letter again, they’re going to ask her. I probably better tell her, but I was quiet too long trying to get the courage to tell her. “I see,” she frowned. “Well, honey, you drinking enough water during the day is a lot more important than if I have to change you a few times a day, okay?” “I don’t really do it though,” I mumbled shaking a little bit. “You don’t do what, honey?” she whispered to me. I was caught off guard that she caught what I said. I figured she’d just ignore what I said. I shrugged. “No…, baby,” she pulled me from the hole so I wouldn’t accidentally fall in, she wrapped her arms around me, and she insisted I tell her what I meant. “What don’t you do, sweetheart?” “I… I… you’ll think I’m lying,” I whispered looking down at my feet. Aunt Shelley bent down and pulled me into her arms. “Why would I think that, honey?” “Because everyone thinks I do it, but I don’t…,” I felt a tear run down my face. “Even daddy thinks I do it now.” She rubbed the tear off my cheek with her thumb. “Honey, just tell me what is on your mind. If you honestly don’t believe you do something, and others are accusing you of it, then I’ll just see what happens and help you see it for yourself if you are wrong, and if you are right, then there will no reason to call you a liar, right?” I shivered a little bit. “Okay…, but everyone else thinks I’m lying,” I told her truthfully. “I don’t care what they think,” she responded with a frown. “I have my own eyes. I can judge for myself, baby.” “I don’t pee my pants in the daytime,” I told her. “Well, I did in the car, but there wasn’t a place to go, and I did kind of pretend to be asleep when I knew I couldn’t hold it because I didn’t want daddy to hit me.” She sighed. “Well, we don’t count a situation where you have no chance to get to a bathroom, do we?” I looked up at her with hope. “You said your daddy stopped for you, though, earlier.” “He did,” I looked down. “I… I just….” “You were nervous and didn’t see a place to stop?” she asked me. I nodded. “Well, I don’t know what your daddy’s rules are, but around here, you can speak up, honey. You are a big kid. You know when you gotta go, and if you really can’t find a place in time, then there will be no accusations. If we need to, we’ll change you once or twice a day. But I’m sure that’s not going to be necessary since you said you don’t do that, okay?” I looked up at her, and she looked serious, like she believed me, and she wasn’t just saying that. I hugged her tightly, and she wrapped her arms around me. “Do you really wet the bed, then?” she whispered to me as though wanting me to tell her if it was true, or if they were exaggerating my problems in the letter. “I do,” I felt my face heat up at having to admit it. “I mean, sometimes, I do. Sometimes, I don’t. It’s not every night, but it’s a lot.” “Then that’s fine,” she told me. “We’ll do whatever your mom usually does to help you stay dry as much as possible, okay?” I smiled and she let me go. “Get another drink, sweetie.” I got some more water. I knew somehow, that it was okay. She believed me, and I didn’t have to worry about her accusing me of wetting myself during the day anymore, unless it really happened. We were back in the kitchen later that night. I had been turned into the living room to watch television for a while, and then I heard the back door open. Uncle Sean came in through the kitchen and was talking to Aunt Shelley. “Is the child settling in then?” he asked her. “She is,” Aunt Shelley seemed happy. “She’s got a lot on her plate though, Sean.” “What do you mean?” “People treat her like she’s a lair and a troublemaker all the time,” I heard her voice dropped, but I crept out of the sofa I was on, and to the doorway, and peeked in at them, so I heard even though she dropped her voice a lot. “Well, that’s not healthy,” he responded. “If you treat someone like a pig, they become like one,” he told her. “Exactly,” Aunt Shelley said. “So promise me, if you see her clothes wet for any reason, please ask her what happened. Don’t stay quiet about it, or she’ll think you just think she was being bad again.” He frowned. “Does she pee in the daytime, then?” “I don’t think so,” Aunt Shelley told him. “I had a talk with her though, and apparently, everyone tells her that she does, but she’s told me she doesn’t.” “Well, she’s certainly old enough to know if she does,” he responded. “I mean, I’d just ignore if a kid is dirty for any reason. That’s natural, for a kid to be dirty.” “But if you do, she’ll misunderstand,” Aunt Shelley said. “So if she fell in water or got dirty, ask her if she’s okay and what happened. If you do, then she’ll realize that you are not accusing her of doing something wrong.” He nodded. That’s when they saw me standing there listening to them. “Oh, sweetheart!” Aunt Shelley ran over and hugged me, dropping what she was doing so that Uncle Sean went to the stove to make sure what she was making wasn’t burning. “There are no secrets in the house?” I asked her. “No, sweetheart,” she confirmed. “But you told Uncle Sean to pretend I didn’t pee my pants if he thought I did?” “Sweetie, that’s not what I told him. I told him that if you looked wet, to ask you. Let you explain.” I looked down. “Okay. But you really think I pee my pants, right?” She rubbed my back. “Of course not, baby. Even if you are scared right now to admit to doing something that’s troublesome for you, you’ll see there is no reason to lie about it soon enough. And big girls like you don’t do that kind of thing without a good cause.” I looked up towards Uncle Sean’s broad face, his hair more salt than pepper, but still rather thick curly hair. “But he said it’s natural for kids to get dirty.” Sean frowned as he considered what I had heard, and then he looked more fully at me, turning his back to the stove for a moment. “Honey, nine year old kids are careless and sit in puddles and dirt, and they play and get their clothes dirty all the time. I never meant to imply I’d expect you to do something you told us you weren’t doing. Kids your age don’t pee their pants in the day, and have likely stopped that well before you are five, so you shouldn’t think we’d think that of you.” I frowned. “My teacher thinks it at school. The other kids think it. My daddy thinks it….” “Well, they aren’t here,” Aunt Shelley covered for Uncle Sean’s awkward silence as he pondered what I said. “You don’t get accused of things here unless you either say you did it, or unless you get caught in the act,” she rubbed my back. “We don’t care what the rumors are, sweetheart.” “Exactly,” Uncle Sean turned back to the stove. “Sweetheart, why don’t you go sit at the table? Dinner is almost ready.” I looked up at Aunt Shelley, and she nodded at me to do what he asked of me. After dinner, where Uncle Sean and Aunt Shelley mostly talked about the farming problems they had, and about a few rumors that Aunt Shelley had been told here and there, but not on this day since I was with her all day, and she didn’t really go anywhere, I started to feel pretty sleepy, and couldn’t keep my eyes open. “Look at her,” I heard as though Uncle Sean were far away in a field. “She’s so exhausted. Why don’t you put her to sleep?” “I will,” Shelley said. “I just want to get started on the dishes first.” “I’ll handle the dishes,” Uncle Sean said. “She’s a girl, and kind of big, so at least for the first couple of nights, you should be the one to put her to bed.” Then there was silence as Aunt Shelley stood up and walked over, and I suddenly felt her lift me up. She was pretty tall and pretty strong. She carried me to the steps, and then set me on my feet. “I’d carry you up, but I’m afraid I might fall with you.” I smiled up at her, and started up the stairs with her right behind me. “Oh, I forgot the milk,” she said looking as if she was about to turn around. “Milk?” I asked her. “In case you get thirsty in the night.” “Oh, I’m not allowed to have anything to drink after dinner,” I looked down. “Does that help you not wet the bed?” Aunt Shelley looked at me as though trying to study my answer. I sadly shook my head. “Mommy says it does, but I still get wet if I didn’t drink anything.” “Then the rule is useless here,” she told me. “What your mommy does at your own home is her business, but here, if you are as likely to wake up wet if you don’t drink anything as you are if you do, then that’s a useless rule to me. I’ll be cleaning your sheets, so it’s up to me, right?” I shrugged, but was kind of scared. “It’s okay,” she told me. “How about this? I’ll let you go to bed as you are for tonight, but if you are wet in the morning, then we won’t be following the drinks rule anymore, okay?” I sighed and let her take me to bed. She put the blankets back when we got into the room, and then she looked me over. “You’re not sleeping in your day clothes are you?” I shook my head. “If I did that, it would be worse. I have night time panties in my bag.” Aunt Shelley smiled and hugged me lightly. “Then we’ll get your night time panties, sweetheart. I just wanted to you to be aware of what you were doing. Normally, whether you wet the bed or not, I wouldn’t think it a good idea to sleep in your day clothes anyway.” “Okay.” Aunt Shelley pulled my clothes off of me, and she helped me put my sleeping panties on, and then she put my sleeping shirt on me before helping me into bed, and then she sat on the end of it, and I lie there, looking down my covered body towards her. “Now,” she smiled smiled at me with her soft glowing kind presence. “You don’t want to wet yourself in your sleep, do you, honey?” I shook my head no. I hated that. “I just want you to know that I understand that you wouldn’t want that, sweetheart, so there will be no accusations. If I wake you in the morning and your panties or your bedding is wet, all I expect from you, is the truth. I won’t be punishing, yelling at, or calling you any names because of an accident, okay?” “Okay.” “I wanted to ask you, though….” I looked up at her. “Did you see something I did bad?” She shook her had. “No, honey, I saw something that was done to you though. Can you maybe explain for me?” “Um…, what did you see?” “When I was bathing you earlier, your arm looked l like someone grabbed you really tight, and then your backs of your legs just below your butt looked a bit bruised.” “I fell down,” I looked down. “Is that what someone told you to say, or did you really fall down?” She seemed to be studying my eyes. “Remember, no lying and no secrets in this house, sweetheart.” “I fell down,” I whispered as I rubbed down by my butt under the blankets. “I fall down sometimes.” Aunt Shelley frowned a little, but she didn’t exactly look mad. “And your arm, honey?” “That’s from being grabbed by the principal the other day when they thought I stole something from my classmate…, well, I did, but it was just a little bit of a drink. I didn’t mean to hurt her, and then I told them I didn’t pee my pants, but they got mad, thinking I lied and grabbed my arm. They said to me that I am a liar and that I did steal, and now I’ve peed my pants.” “I thought you said you ran away, and they didn’t catch up with you for a while,” Aunt Shelley asked softly. “I did run away. Everyone looked at me like I peed, and my sister even said I kept doing it, and I got mad and hurt and sad and confused and… I… I just ran out of the building and off the school grounds.” “So they grabbed you like this even when they weren’t mad at you?” “I think they were mad because they grabbed me when they finally found me, and they marched me to school. But I think they also grabbed me hard so I couldn’t get away, so I wouldn’t run again because they kept my arm until we were in the office, and he pushed me into the wood chair, and then I fell.” “Is that what you meant by you fell?” Aunt Shelley asked me. I nodded. “The chair fell over, and I landed on the floor.” “Honey, that bruise doesn’t look like you just fell off a chair though. Did someone hit you?” I shook my head. “They didn’t hit me. They just pushed me.” “What did your dad say when you showed him that you were hurt from being pushed?” “He didn’t know. I mean, I didn’t tell him because last time I got in trouble, and I thought they grabbed me hard, he said it was my fault, and if I wouldn’t keep being a troublemaker, then no one would have a reason to touch me.” Aunt Shelley sighed. “Well, you are here for the summer, sweetheart. No one will be pushing you down here.” I looked up at her thinking that Uncle Sean looked scary. I wondered if he might push me and she wouldn’t know. I didn’t tell her though. She said he wouldn’t, and I didn’t want to make her mad by saying he might. I slept for a short while, before I felt my body nagging at me to wake up. I opened my eyes and felt round my butt and the bed, but it was dry. I slipped out of the blankets and went quietly to the door of the bedroom, wondering how late it was. I wanted to pee, but I was kind of scared. I pulled door open a bit, and looked down the hall. It wasn’t really that dark, but the lights up on the second floor balcony were all off. There were lights from downstairs on, though, and I thought I heard voices. I ran towards the bathroom, but it was too long. I started to pee my pants halfway to the toilet. I froze. Then I heard the voices getting closer as they came up the steps, and then both of them caught me, standing there, pee still drizzling into my panties that started to fill too much and started to leak down my legs. “They’ve been handling her a bit rough even at school, and apparently her dad just lets the school…,” was the last thing Aunt Shelley was telling Uncle Sean, when they stood there in front of me, catching me holding my hands against my panties as pee ran uncontrollably into them. “I’ve got her,” Aunt Shelley said. Uncle Sean walked over and put a heavy but kind hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, baby,” he told me. “Accidents happen. Go with Shelley, and she’ll get you sorted and back to bed, okay?” I looked down at the ground, though I did feel myself shake and I felt the an unnerving urge to pull away when he first went to touch me, and then was relieved when he only patted my shoulder. Aunt Shelley took me gently by the hand, and led me back into the bedroom, and when we were by my bed again, she sat on it and pulled me close to her as she started to lift my nightshirt off over my head. I had gotten it wet where I tried to push on my panties to stop it wetting, but the pee just went through the panties and all over the shirt. I had tears starting to run down my face. “It’s okay,” she whispered to me. “You tried, honey. It’s not even an hour past midnight, so this is really just a nighttime accident, like you’d wet the bed, as far as I’m concerned, honey. You’re not in trouble, and no one is accusing you of anything, okay?” I felt my mouth quivering. At home, daddy would have slapped me and asked me why I was peeing in my pants if I was still awake. “And this settles it for me,” Aunt Shelley told me. “Not drinking anything before bed didn’t keep you from wetting on yourself in the night, did it honey?” I shook my head no. I started to get a little bit scared, and my jaw quivered as I tried to find a way to explain why I peed my pants, but she just kept looking me with those soft eyes that started to let me know I wasn’t even in trouble. “I’m not withholding drinks from you even at night if it doesn’t do anything to stop you wetting your pants,” she told me. “That’s just cruel, baby. So if you want, after we get you cleaned up, I’ll take you down for a little drink and then you can go back to bed.” “I’m not thirsty,” I told her still sad I peed even if I wasn’t in trouble. “Well, that’s alright then,” she told me. “But if you do get thirsty, you know where the water is, don’t you?” I nodded. “Then I’ll just let you handle that on your own if you need it.” She had my soaking wet night panties off me by then, and I was naked. “Hold on a moment,” she patted me on the thigh and stood up. “I’ll be right back, honey.” I stood there, looking towards the window. Aunt Shelley had left the curtain pulled back a little to let the night stars and moon shine their dim light though. She had done that when she put me to bed the first time, wondering if I was scared of the dark. I was a little bit, but I never answered her if I was because I thought it was another annoying thing, that daddy said to me, eight years old, and still scared of the dark on top of pissing in your bed? So I didn’t say anything. She came back not maybe a minute later, and she had a bucket of warm water and a couple of rags, and she sat on my bed again pulling me towards her. Handing me one rag, she whispered softly. “Clean your pee pee place, okay?” I smiled and took the cloth starting to clean off, and she took another cloth and started to clean down my legs and then turned me to clean my bottom and the backs of my legs. Then she put me in clean panties and a different night shirt, not one of mine though, but one I didn’t know she had. The next morning, I was walking down and into the kitchen with a clean pair of purple shorts on and a white shirt that had a little bow tied just by the neck. Uncle Sean was sitting at the table as he looked over at me, and Aunt Shelley smiled. “Did you sleep okay?” Sean asked me. “I did,” I blushed. “I mean, after what happened….” He made a noise that I couldn’t really make out when I said that, but Aunt Shelley came over and put her hands lightly on my shoulder putting me in a chair, and then she bent down to my eyes. “I told you last night, didn’t I?” “Um….” I wasn’t sure what she was talking about at first. “It was an accident in the night. As far as we are concerned, it’s no different than bed wetting what happened, and you don’t get in trouble or called names for having night time accidents, baby. You don’t have to worry about what happened, sweetheart. That’s why I didn’t go up to check on you this morning. I don’t think it’s important for you to see every time I notice your bedding wet. You know you have troubles, and you know Sean and I know it, so there is no reason to make you feel bad about it, okay?” I looked down. “Okay, well, what do you want to for breakfast?” she tried to change the topic. “We have eggs, bacon, and ….” But as she was telling me what there was, I don’t know why, I just had to let them know. “But I only peed the once in the night. I promise, I didn’t wet the bed afterwards.” Aunt Shelley smiled at me, and when I glanced over to see if Uncle Sean would believe me, he smiled and could only say “Now.” but I understood, he just didn’t know what to say, but he wasn’t mad or anything. “Well, that’s alright then,” Aunt Shelley said as she rubbed my shoulders. “But it doesn’t matter to me how much you wet in the night. It’s not your fault and for whatever reason, something you can’t control right now, so don’t worry about it, okay?” I looked down. She lifted my face. “I mean it, sweetheart. We believe you. If you say you didn’t wet the bed after that, then you didn’t. I just want you to know even if you did, you wouldn’t be in trouble.” “Okay.” We ate breakfast, and while we were eating, Aunt Shelley looked over at Uncle Sean. “How’s the farm work? Do you think you’ll have time to show her around?” “I’m sorry, but not today,” he frowned. “I want to fix a couple of fences and check some other things first to make sure it’s safe for her. Maybe in a couple of days when I’ve child-proofed it a little more?” Aunt Shelley smiled at him. “That’ll be fine. I can show her what I do during the day then.” I smiled at them both. “Daddy never lets me go to the farm where the animals are. He says I’d cause too much trouble, and get in the way.” “Well, has plenty of help, doesn’t he?” Sean said as though trying to make light of daddy not trusting me to work with him. “He has three older strong daughters, right? But maybe after I kid-safe the farm, maybe you can hang out with me.” I smiled. Uncle Sean was nice. Aunt Shelley let me watch television for a little bit, and then I just kind of played around with Mr. Ivory until Aunt Shelley came in to the living room to my corner, and smiling down at me, she asked me. “Do you want to help me?” I got up sure. “Yeah!” I never felt like I got to help anyone before, not really. “I’m going to be putting some stuff in jars and preparing things for a home that keeps twelve children,” she told me. “I usually do it by myself, but I think having a little company and a little help could be nice.” “I won’t be too much trouble to teach?” I asked. She chortled a little. “No, honey, I’ll show you what you are to do. I’m sure you’re smart enough to get it the first time, and if you make a little mistake, then it wouldn’t be the end of the world, would it?” A couple of hours later, Auntie Shelley and I were both chopping up onions, side by side, Auntie having shown me several times how to hold the knife and onions so I wouldn’t cut my fingers, and we were both trying to rub at the corners of our eyes with the parts of our hands that didn’t have onion juices on them. It was kind of funny standing side by side with her, both of us trying to cut the onions. I loved it. While we cut the onions, Uncle Sean came through the house and went to the kitchen phone. “What’s going on?” Aunt Shelley asked. “It’s one of the calves. I think we need the vet.” “The number should be….” “I know where it is,” Sean snapped back, but he wasn’t looking at Aunt Shelley or me. He was probably just very worried, and Aunt Shelley turned her attention back to me as though Sean hadn’t yelled at her. “He takes it personal when one of the animals get hurt or sick,” Aunt Shelley told me. “He didn’t mean anything. He is probably just trying to keep in his head what to tell the doctor.” I looked up at her, and her smile relaxed me. “Did I cause him trouble? Maybe I took too much of his time?” I asked her. “You didn’t do anything,” she told me. “Just relax, okay?” I sat down in a chair while Aunt Shelley rinsed off all the onions, and then she brought over the jars we were going to put them in. “If they are going to use this stuff soon,” I asked her. “Why not just give them the whole onions?” “Well, we do sometimes give them whole onions,” she told me. “But these are specially prepared for the children to play around with and to make relish with.” “Oh.” “Mrs. Vingt says that children need to have skills for when they grow up, so she teaches them things to help them take care when they age out of her home. She’s been running that place for the last thirty years.” “So, they aren’t her real children then?” “Oh, don’t you dare go telling her that they are not her real children,” Aunt Shelley laughed. “You’ll get one irate mama bear after you if you go saying things like that. To her, every child she has ever taken care of was special to her.” I smiled and looked down. “Like you do with me?” Aunt Shelley looked like I caught her off guard, and she was quiet for a long moment, and I sat nervously wondering if I went too far with my questions. “I suppose, yeah, like you are to me,” she finally said with a smile. “I’d definitely go to bat for someone like you.” “You took a while to answer,” I looked into her eyes to study her. “Well, it’s been a long time since we last saw each other, and you’d grown so much, honestly, I wasn’t sure if I knew you enough to answer that question, but as I thought about what you’d already shared with me, and considered how much you’d grown on me since just yesterday afternoon, I realized that, yeah, just like that woman loves all twelve of her kids, I do care about you.” I smiled. “I care about you, too, Aunt Shelley.” Then I hugged her. “Careful,” she warned me. “I’m holding a knife, sweetheart.” I nodded and backed off long enough for her to put it down. “I’m not too much trouble for you, then?” “Trouble?” she scoffed. “Trouble? You were helping me all mornings, honey. And you helped peel the potatoes last night, and you’ve been a little angel!” “Except peeing my pants last night,” I mumbled looking down. “You mean wetting in your near sleep,” Aunt Shelley corrected me. “We don’t count night time accidents around her. You have a problem, and there is no trouble or shame in having things you need help with sometimes.” I sighed and she lifted me into her lap. “Sammy? You had fun this morning, didn’t you?” “Yeah,” I smiled up at her. “Then, let’s not ruin that by bringing up things that make you sad, okay? Everyone has problems now and then, and it’s not healthy to think too much on things that can’t be solved right away, okay?” “Okay.”

Chapter Two: Cousins, but Uncle Sean and Aunt Shelley I was in the car, and we were just pulling around a long windy dirt road towards the house I’d be staying at for the next two maybe three months, or maybe even longer, if daddy didn’t really care how long they kept me. I sat up miserably from a long nap that I had been eased into because of the long rhythmic ride, the hot sun that was not helped against by the broken air control in the car, and the heavy sadness that had washed over me since leaving the house that morning. The night before I had to leave, I was told by my daddy to put my stupid reading away because I wasn’t going to need to have my homework finished. Mommy had told me that I was going to her cousin’s house earlier when I got the mail, and then when daddy and Gracie came in from the fields, daddy was apparently showing her around and telling her what she’d be doing that summer, that’s when they told Gracie that I was leaving. That night, supper had been a very quiet one, none of my sisters knowing what to say, and my dad and mom didn’t seem to really be speaking to one another either. Then I went to bed, and to my surprise, Leah and in and crawled into bed with me. “Leah, this is my bed,” I had reminded her. “I know,” she said putting an arm around me. Then Gracie got in my bed, and then Jenna came in last, and she got in bed with Katie-Beth. All this time, I thought I was just an annoyance to Leah, and I had started to think especially after everyone at school started to call me names after they thought I peed myself at school, that she wished I’d be sent away. But she was sad, and then in the morning, she woke up with my pee all over her, but she didn’t say anything about that. She just hugged me tightly when she saw I was awake, and she whispered to me. “It’s going to be okay.” So I climbed into the back seat, and I was driven off, my two eldest sisters having been sent to the fields to start their chores, so they weren’t even allowed to see me go, and Leah holding my hands and telling me she’d tell me that she’d let them know I was looking for them. The hot car ride, my heart heavy, the air not working, and daddy having bought us some drinks for the ride because it was so hot…, well, I woke up and I felt around my white shorts I had on. They were soaked and so was the car seat. I had done it again. Dad stopped the car a maybe forty or fifty feet from the front porch, and then I saw a golden dog and a sort of a fat man with more white than black in his hair who was standing up from bending down at an old farm tractor as dad had gotten out of the car and started to walked towards him without even a glance back at me. “Sean!” I heard my daddy called to the man from my window that had been rolled all the way down to try to get some air into the car during the ride. “Dave!” Sean called back as he looked around and saw daddy approaching him. “So you’ve brought the girl after all, then?” he asked in a conversational way. “Yeah, well, it’s like Ruth said in her letter, isn’t it? I have to start working in town tomorrow, and with Ruth being laid up, there is really no one to keep her out of trouble at home. My older girls will be stepping up and taking care of the farm, and my youngest is too young to be without her mommy or I’d have taken her, too.” “And she would have been welcome,” Sean said. Then I noticed that the car door opposite of where I was sitting was being open. I quickly tried to cover my shorts with the long t-shirt I was wearing. I didn’t want to bring shame on daddy by some stranger catching me having peed in my pants. “Well, there she is,” a smiling tall slender woman with brown hair smiled in at me. “Come on out, let me get a proper look at you.” I nervously sat there, really wishing she’d just give up and leave me there, but she stood there, as I sat making up my mind. She’s going to see what I’ve done. I felt some tears in my eyes, but I couldn’t disobey her on top of being bad. Daddy would be really mad then. With a sigh that was meant to try to draw up all my courage, knowing she was about to see how much a baby I was, or how dirty I was, or whatever she thought of what I had done, and knowing I was going to get yelled at and probably swatted, I finally grabbed my Mr. Ivory, and I scooted to her side of the car seat, and then stood out of the car. The lady looked me up and and down, and her smile only deepened as she reached out towards my face. If she smacked me, I’d have deserved it. Daddy sometimes smacked me in the face if I said something bad, or if back talked mom or him. She didn’t smack me, though. She just lifted my hair from my face and pulled it back around my ears and behind my face, and she stepped back again. “Do you remember me?” she asked. I wanted to talk, I did, but I was so scared. I stood there in soaking wet shorts that were also dirty from sitting on the dusty seat in the car, some of the air blew in dirt sometimes when we were on dirt roads, so not only my shorts, but my face and my shirt was a bit dirty, too. I knew I smelled. I could only looked downcast with my face, but my eyes were looking sideways up at her. “You were still hiding behind your mommy’s skirts and sucking your thumb the last time I saw you.” She didn’t even say, you were wearing wet pants or something like you are now to me, and that got my attention, and I looked up properly at her. She wasn’t paying attention to my shorts at all. “A little quiet?” she asked me. “Um… I… yeah, I guess. My daddy says I don’t talk enough.” “Well, we are near to strangers after all,” the lady told me. “I wouldn’t blame you for being a little bit shy, sweetheart.” I smiled. I liked her. “You can call me Shelley,” she finally told me her name. “And would it be alright if I called you Samantha, or would you prefer something else?” I looked down my face really hot and my mind a little mixed up and embarrassed at the way she was talking to me. I’d never been asked by a big person before what I preferred to be called. “Um… everyone just calls me Sam or Sammy. You can call me what you like,” I told her truthfully. “Daddy even just calls me wanderer, troublemaker, and Miss Pissy sometimes.” The woman frowned when I said the last thing. “Well, there will be no unpleasant name calling in my house,” she told me. “If you like Sam or Sammy, then we’ll just stick to that.” “Not even when you’re mad?” I asked the nice lady. “Honey, people say a lot of things that they later regret when they are mad. It’s no excuse, and I will do everything I can to hold back because it’s wrong to call a child names, especially that last one.” “But all the names are true,” I hung my head but being honest. “I do pee the bed at night.” She put an arm around my shoulders and started to walk me into the house. “What happens to you when you are asleep is no reflection on who you really are, sweetie. We all grow at different rates, and you are not the first eight or nine year old to have nightie pee pees, okay?” I nodded. She walked me into the kitchen, and she looked at me as I stood there. She smiled a bit, and the door opened and I heard daddy and the man coming in behind us. “Hi there, Dave,” the woman said to daddy. “Hi, yourself, Shelley. I want you to know, as much as we are asking, and it’s no small favor, we are grateful to you and your husband for watching after Troublemaker.” Shelley frowned at him. “She’s more than welcome here.” Daddy put his hands on my shoulder, without even looking at my soaked shorts, and he stirred me to the table and then lifted me up and put me in their nicer chair at the table. It had an actual cloth-like seat instead of the chairs we had at our house that were just all wood, that they tried to soften with flimsy cloth cushions. I stiffened. I knew better than to fight daddy if he was putting me down somewhere, but I also felt bad I was going to wet on the nice people’s chair, and I didn’t even know how they were going to clean my pee out of the chair like that, but daddy either didn’t realize I peed myself, or he didn’t care. I saw man watch as daddy lifted me off my feet, and before anyone could say anything, had me in the chair. “Good children sit when they are not being talked to,” daddy whispered in my ear. I didn’t know what to say, so I could only hang my head after he placed me down. “She may seem stubborn,” Daddy told the people. “But she doesn’t really fight you if she knows she behaved improperly. She will be obedient.” I looked longingly at the bucket of water on the counter. It had been some time since I had finished my last soda because the car ride was really long, but I was scared to ask. I was sitting there in wet shorts at their table, and I knew I was causing trouble again, so I just sat there, looking at the water. “There’s the little one,” Sean looked at me from across the table. “You want some water, honey?” he seemed to have read my mind or maybe I was just looking at the water for too long. “Oh, excuse me,” the lady called Shelley said. “I should have realized she’d be thirsty.” The lady got a plastic glass from the cupboard, and she pour some water into it. “Sammy!” daddy demanded. I knew immediately what I’d done wrong. “Thank you, Shel…,” and daddy suddenly smacked me on the leg making me jump. “How did you address the lady?” he asked me telling me that I was being impolite without saying it. “We had discussed this before we left this morning, hadn’t we?” I shook a moment, and wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Maybe I had forgotten something? “She’s not a child like you. You don’t call her by her first name without a sign of respect, remember?” “Oh,” I looked down. “It’s just that she….” “I taught you better, Sammy. No excuses. I better not hear of you disrespecting them!” “I… I won’t,” I promised tears in my eyes. “Then thank her properly.” “Thank you, Aunt Shelley.” He rubbed my leg where he smacked it, so show me that he approved of the way I said it, and that’s when he must have noticed. “Sammy! Did you just piss yourself?” I started to feel tears in my eyes. “Dave,” Sean drew his attention his way, or I should think, Uncle Sean so I don’t get in trouble again. “Didn’t you say the drive was pretty far?” Daddy looked over towards him. “She was wet when I got her out of the car,” Aunt Shelley said. “Ruth said in her letter that this one wets in her sleep. Isn’t it possible that she wet in her sleep again?” Daddy frowned. “Well, it was a nine hour ride, and she didn’t really say anything about needing the toilet until we got here. Maybe that’s what happened.” I looked up at daddy. “I’m sorry about the car,” I tried to tell him that that is what happened without making him look bad. “I just forgot to ask you, and then fell asleep, and then it just was wet when I woke up.” He sighed. “Well, there you have it,” he told the man. “Are you sure you want to deal with this all summer?” “It’s not a problem,” Aunt Shelley gave Uncle Sean a look and he turned back to daddy. “Dave, this doesn’t really change anything. Ruth told Shelley that the girl wets the bed, so we were already warned that this could happen.” “Well, I guess at least your misbehavior didn’t sour them on keeping you out of trouble this summer then,” daddy rubbed my leg to let me know that somehow I had gotten out of trouble. “You are turning nine in about a month and a half though, so you really need to stop doing this sort of thing.” I sighed and looked down. Aunt Shelley started to get some stuff she had under towels and put a little bit of a supper in front of us. It was around four in the afternoon, though, and daddy had gotten me lunch at around one, so I wasn’t starving, but I was a bit hungry. “So your youngest is just starting to get hardy, and now you have another coming in a month, yeah?” “Yes, ma’am. The trouble is the feeding them. There’s no appetite like a child’s, and this one is no different.” “Well, don’t we all eat the same as we grow?” Aunt Shelley reminded him. “We all do it in spurts, don’t we?” “Yeah? Well, she’ll eat for sure, but you can work her.” “There’ll be no need for any of that,” Uncle Sean told him. “She’s more than welcome here,” Aunt Shelley agreed. “We gladly keep her.” Daddy sighed. He had hardly touched his roast beef, that Aunt Shelley had probably specifically prepared for the occasion of him dropping me off, and instead of eating it, he looked around for what to do with the butt of his cigarette that he had been puffing away on since he started to talk to Sean out when we arrived, and seeing no ash tray, he put the thing out in the roast beef. Aunt Shelley looked at him with a look that wasn’t exactly a dirty look, I wouldn’t say, but it was definitely not a look of endearment when he did that. “She’ll eat you out of house and home, but I don’t suppose there’ll be any word on that come twelve months from now?” daddy asked them. There was a moment of awkwardness, and so I spoke up. “I need the bathroom.” Daddy looked at me like I had to be joking, as he pointedly glanced down at my shorts making me feel guilty about interrupting their conversation such as it was. I shook a little bit, but Aunt Shelley got up and she came over and helped me out of my chair. She walked me into the main entry, and pointed up the steps. “The downstairs restroom isn’t working properly, so go on up to the top of the steps, and it will be through the exact door opposite of the stairs. Understand?” I smiled up at her and she let me go on my own. The floor was so soft, and the house was so clean compared with our house. I came to the top of the stairs, and my curiosity caused me to look both left and right, and I saw the bedroom doors open, just so I could see enough in them to make out that they were likely very nice rooms, and they were both clean, but other than that, I couldn’t really make out any details. I remembered why I was up there, and I hurried into the bathroom before I caused more trouble. When I got back downstairs, I noticed that Aunt Shelley had placed a towel on my seat for me, and she frowned when I came down wearing my wet shorts. “Didn’t you want to change your pants?” she asked me. “Um, I did. I was just waiting until I had permission or I wasn’t bothering anyone because my suitcase is still in the car.” “Well, I think daddy was just about to get your suitcase, wasn’t he?” and she looked right at daddy. “Right.” I stood there, awkwardly as daddy and Uncle Sean went out to the car to get my suitcase, and I looked up at Aunt Shelley. “I’m sorry.” “For what, sweetheart?” she smiled at me and the way she did, it kind of comforted me a little bit. “Well…, I peed in the car and then I sat in your good chair and got it all messed up with my dirtiness,” I mumbled up at her. “Honey, I saw exactly what happened, and you did nothing wrong. You were put in the chair without even asking you, and you were still rubbing sleep out of your eyes when I got you from the car, so none of that was your fault, sweetheart.” I just looked down my face blushing. “Don’t you worry about it,” she said. “When your daddy brings in your clothes, we’ll send you off to go change you shorts, okay?” “Thank you, Aunt Shelley.” I was given a skirt and a pair of my bedtime panties by daddy as he went through my suitcase to pick out my clothes for me, and then I was asked to go back to the bathroom and told to just leave my dirty things there. Finally, after visiting a little longer, daddy put another cigarette out in the roast beef, gathered up his pack and lighter, and he was getting ready to be out the door…. “Well…, I guess I should be hitting the road.” “Hold on just a minute,” Aunt Shelley said to him as he got to his feet. “I want to send something back for Ruthie.” “Alright, but I do need to get on the road. It’s a long road back, and I have to be up early in the morning for my new job.” Aunt Shelley came in with a bunch of long thing tubes of something plant-like, and she hoisted them up at daddy, but it was unexpected or something, because he dropped several of them. He didn’t reach down though to retrieve them, and I noticed that Aunt Shelley wasn’t in a hurry to help him, either, so after an awkward moment, Uncle Sean was the one that bent down and collected them handing them to daddy while daddy and Aunt Shelley more or less, just had a daring contest, where they tried to stare the other one into giving in. “Well, then…,” and daddy started to walk to the front door, and Uncle Sean was on his heels while Aunt Shelley held my shoulders as she walked me a little more slowly out into the yard. “Don’t fret, sweetie,” she told me. “I’ll get you a bath after your daddy goes, so you don’t have to be dirty anymore, okay?” I looked up at her gratefully. I didn’t like that I smelled like piss, and that I was still pretty sticky and dirty from all the hours riding in the car, and dirt sticking to my skin after I had peed. We were outside, and I looked sadly towards the car. This was it. He was leaving me here, and while I had already started to like Aunt Shelley, I was still not going to be home, and I already missed my mommy, my sisters, and my life at home. I wanted to cry. Daddy pointed at me. “And you, try to stay out of trouble this summer.” I just looked up at Aunt Shelley who smiled and waved at him like she was glad to see him go. And just like that, before I knew it, Aunt Shelley had me upstairs in her bathroom again, and my shameful wet soaking shorts and my bedtime training panties all wet on the floor. I saw her filling the tub and looked down at my dirty body knowing that I was a disgrace. I mean, even my sisters would be ashamed to be in this beautifully clean house in the state we were used to. “Go ahead,” Aunt Shelley said encouragingly to me. “Take off your clothes, sweetheart. I’ll show you how to clean up properly.” I nodded. I loved my mommy, but I don’t remember her actually teaching us how to bathe the right way, and I could tell even at school, that I was always a bit off from others. I think I even smelled, and that being a bed wetter, and feeling like we were rushed out in the mornings, it made sense that I probably did smell like I just did it. No wonder the teacher thought I peed my pants all the time. Aunt Shelley had the bath ready to go by the time I had my clothes off and was ready to step into the bath. “We’ll just wash the clothes you just had on, too,” she told me. “I know you didn’t wet again, but you were dirty when you put them on because you hadn’t had a chance to bathe, and your body was sticky all afternoon from being in the car.” I nodded. “You daddy did stop for you when you needed it, didn’t he?” she asked as she helped me start to step into the tub. I pulled my foot back. “It’s hot.” Her soothing smile calmed me though, and she replied comfortingly. “You’ll get used to it.” So I stepped in again, and waited a moment before I sat down and into the water. Once I had indeed gotten comfortable like she knew I would do, I looked up at her. “He stopped,” I looked down. “I’m just stupid, bad, and dirty. I’m… I’m a troublemaker.” Aunt Shelley shook her head. “No, honey. Wetting in your sleep doesn’t make you a troublemaker. I was just asking that he was taking care of you properly.” “He did,” I replied remembering that early in the morning, he had gotten us sodas because of the hot ride, and at lunch time, he had woken me to eat. Neither time, I felt like peeing, so he didn’t have a reason to take me to the toilet. “Well, it was quite a long ride after all,” Aunt Shelley told me. “When you have to get up to start the drive?” “I think we left around seven,” I smiled at her. “So, you were in the car from seven…,” and I think she did some mental math. “...and arriving at around three, means you were in the car for about eight hours minus maybe 20 minutes for a lunch break, and the 10 minutes for the stop in the morning?” I shrugged. I didn’t like thinking about school work, and this seemed like math to me. “I guess so.” She smiled at me. “Well, never mind. You are here, now, so what matters is what is done from now.” I smiled and she started to get the cloth soapy. Back at home, we had a spigot outside the kitchen. All the children gathered around it in the mornings, and just in our underwears, we would get washed down by the sister just older than us, and then the water would be sprayed from the spigot at all of us to rinse off, and then we’d go back upstairs to get dressed for school or the day. Sometimes, though, we didn’t have time to do all that, so we’d just get dressed, and I’d even have to go to school in the panties I wore to bed because mom had a hard time keeping mine clean since I wet the bed all the time. Aunt Shelley washed me very gently compared to what Leah did, but then Leah was washed the same way by Jenna, who was washed the same way by Gracie. Gracie, well, she had it a little rougher when dad washed her, and a little more the same when mommy washed her. Sometimes, I wondered why Gracie didn’t just wash herself, or even Jenna, but you never told dad how things were to be at the house. To do so, was to question the way he raised us, so of course no one could say it aloud even if the others wondered why. Aunt Shelley looked at me again, as she started to wash my arms. “Your mom is busy, I reckon?” “Busy?” “Yeah. She is getting ready for the new baby, and she’s trying to keep all you girls in good health?” “Yeah. She’s waiting for the men that are supposed to cut the hay.” “Your parents haven’t had that done yet?” she asked me. I shrugged. “They’re waiting for money to do it.” Aunt Shelley looked a little sad. “I see.” I felt so relaxed as Aunt Shelley continued to wash me. It was so relaxing, and I couldn’t believe how nice it felt. I wondered if she was getting the piss off my body, but I didn’t dare question her. It’s not a child’s place to question, is it? “And how are your sisters doing?” she asked me as she washed down one leg, again, the sensation just so smooth and so nice for a change, that even if I had a right to speak up about it, I really didn’t want her to scrub it. “They’re okay,” I told her. “Gracie let me sleep with her once, but it got her in trouble. Daddy thinks she peed the bed, and she got yelled at.” “Did you get scared or something?” Aunt Shelley’s voice was soft and kind. “No. I just came to my bed to get ready to sleep, and Gracie, taking me in, felt sorry for me because mom forgot to wash my sheets.” “Well…, you could have told her dad that you slept with her. That would have been the right thing to do….” I looked down. “I wanted to, but Gracie said no. And Gracie spoke over me when mom found out both our sheets hanging out the next morning. Gracie said she peed in her sleep and she got me up in case I did it, too, and I just didn’t want to say I peed in Gracie’s bed.” Aunt Shelley sighed. “Well, around here, we tell the truth, okay? Lying just makes anything we do wrong, worse.” I smiled up at her. “I would have told. Gracie didn’t want me to.” She nodded. “So what did they do to your sister?” “In the end, nothing. Mommy said it was probably stress. They make Gracie do a lot, and even daddy said it was probably that. He said last night, that me staying here, will help Gracie not wet the bed again.” Aunt Shelley frowned. “Well, I think that’s enough of that,” and she grabbed a funny little brush from the side of the tub, and she smiled at me again. “I’m sure everything will work out and you’ll be home again with your mom, your dad, and your sisters with the new baby.” I smiled up at her thanking her for not making me tell her how much a troublemaker I was, well, not in worse, just with a grateful smile, but I think she understood. “Would it be alright if I put a plastic sheet on the bed you sleep in?” Aunt Shelley asked me. “It would protect the mattress, and make clean up a little easier.” I didn’t know why she asked me. It was her house, her bed, and her rules, wasn’t it? It’s not like I had a right to say no, but I smiled up at her. I kind of liked that she would make it so I at least didn’t cause as much trouble when I pissed myself like at home. “After we finish with your bath, I need to collect some water,” Auntie Shelley said as she was rinsing my hair. “I’d appreciate you coming with me.” I looked up at her confused after she had rinsed out my hair. “I’m kind of mixed up,” I told her. “I mean, you have water upstairs. Why do we have to collect the water?” “Well, honey, not everything is safe these days. While I think the water that runs through the pipes is safe enough to wash and to put on the outsides of our bodies, I don’t think it’s really pure. We get our cooking and drinking water from a well that was installed on this farm since before Uncle Sean’s granddad was born.” “So, this farm is a thousand years old?” I asked her. Rather than correct my logic, Aunt Shelley agreed with my emotional feeling. She smiled and said, “Yes, little love. It has been there a long time, and no one has ever gotten sick from drinking from it, so I trust it more than the stuff they are pouring through the pipes these days.” “Mom and dad say that’s why we don’t have plumbing exactly. They say that the government is messing with the water some how, and so we just have a pump thing outside that goes to the farm’s water. Daddy says that water is natural and what God meant for us.” Aunt Shelley helped me out of the tub. “So, can you go with me down to the well?” I looked down. It felt like she was taking me to a secret place. I once saw daddy’s secret place. That’s when I first met that woman we picked up on the street last week, and knew that daddy shouldn’t be there alone with her, but I still don’t know exactly what daddy did wrong, only that mommy didn’t like it. “Honey? Is something wrong with going to the well with me?” “Um… It’s a secret?” I asked. “A secret?” Auntie Shelley looked a little confused at me. “Am I not supposed to tell anyone what happens there?” “Look at me,” her voice was as smooth, tender, and quiet as ever. “There are no secrets in this house.” I looked down sadly. I’ve heard that before. “Do you hear me?” Auntie Shelley asked. “Yes,” I mumbled scared I had upset her. “Yes, what?” she asked though she didn’t raise her voice at all. “There are no secrets in this house,” I repeated what I didn’t really believe. “When there are secrets in a house, that house has shame,” she told me getting closer and putting a hand on my shoulder, not one that shook me to understand like daddy would have done, but one, more like she was asking me to think like her. I wondered what she could possibly mean though. I didn’t think daddy had any shame. Mommy knew about the girl he saw sometimes, and she didn’t like it, but daddy wasn’t ashamed of it. I sighed. “Awh, you’d be too young to understand,” she smiled at me. “Never mind, honey. Shall we go?” I smiled and offered my hand. Even if I didn’t get it, I didn’t think going to the well was a bad thing. And we started our real friendship. Sorry I seemed to have gotten on your nerves. Yes, she does nod a lot. She's quiet, and she's actually kind of speak up sometimes. Maybe I'll successfully explain that in the coming chapters ahead, where it isn't as annoying. while sometimes it is unfriendly the way people write a criticism, they truly could have had a bad day, or maybe a certain repetition really got on their nerves, and the best way to explain their frustration is to write back what they are seeing. Thank you for defending me, but sometimes, tension isn't diffused by just attacking someone that thinks they are criticizing a story to try to alert a writer that something is aggrevating to read. Maybe if you left out the "And who shat in your coffee comment, and you just started with Maybe..., your comment might not seem as hurtful to someone reading it? Just a suggestion. I know you had good intentions and were just defending someone you didn't want to get scared off from writing. Just maybe please remember everyone on the board is growing and we all make mistakes sometimes? I'd hate for anyone to be afraid to tell me where I went wrong, just because they might be shouted down is all. Yeah, it comes across very mean at first, but I've mulled over what they were getting at, and you too.

yes, I tried that at first, but when I did, I missed some important points when I tried to edit it the third time, which is why I decided to post the finished one from this point. That way, if anyone catches something I meant to have in there, and missed it, if they read both, they can let me know. The first draft is actually a re-write twice. Once, when I tried to correct my own things I saw, and then once when I tried to correct the type of diapers, but then saw some things that somehow got changed back to mistakes again, and so, yeah, maybe I'll just delete the first page... from here, after people that want to compare both have ha a chance to do so. But as I don't trust my own saved copies to be correct, I'll just leave the latest one on here. I think that I had seen those wars, too before high school, but apparently, that would be wrong. So... I just changed the story so we don't have to orry about the memories of us old people. I know I've been off on other things, it seems, too.

Sent Away Ishigreen Chapter 1: Why they must send me away I was sitting in reading class, next to one of the smartest kids in class. I supposed that if I had the nerve to cheat, it could have been a good thing, but I just never really thought cheating at stuff that I wasn’t good at would really be worth it. Ally seemed to have an annoyed look on her face while I sat in my seat next to her struggling over every few words and the teacher having to tell me the word off and on like so much that I was sure most of the class thought I belonged in first or maybe second grade, but here I was, eight years old and in the third grade. My birthday was in July, so I was among the youngest of the third graders. My finger under the words, I read. “The man said hello to the g… ji… jil…,” and the teacher corrected me. “girl.” I felt the pit in my stomach tighten as I was corrected. I felt like everyone behind me was staring at my neck, and my face felt like it heated up several degrees. My arms shook as I continued to try to read. “… The girl said to the man. ‘I don… don’t ta… tal…”, and I paused not sure. I haven’t even heard of this word before, have I? “...talk…,” the teacher urged me on. Oh! “...um… ‘talk to stah…” I wished so much that she would just call on someone else, anyone else! This was torture. “… strangers …,” the teacher encouraged. Finally, when I came to the end of the line, Ally was allowed to take over, and I could almost see a look of relieve come over her face as she put her finger under the next word in her own book and started to read like the words just glided together into one long strand of letters that made sense to her. She was the best student in the class. Reading wasn’t the only thing I struggled with at school. Math wasn’t so bad, but I didn’t really have any friends, and it was sometimes hard not to get in trouble. Mom was pregnant, and really showing it lately, and she really had little energy for mundane tasks around the house. There were like five girls already to take care of, including Grace, the eldest sister who was 14, Jenna 13, Leah 11, me… 8, and then Katie-Beth 5. This morning before coming to school, one thing I couldn’t help but notice, was that mom had stopped being able to even put our lunches together like she usually did. Dad had walked into the house from outside, doing something with the cows or the chickens, I think, and he walked past us while my oldest sisters, Grace and Jenna were arguing about whether one of Jenna’s friends was stupid or not, and for a moment, I thought dad had went off to the other room. “That’s not how it’s done,” Grace told Jenna. “My friend, Vernona, saw it,” she told Grace back. “Your friend is an idiot. There is a lot more to it than that.” “Na-uh!” Then from just around the corner out of earshot I heard dad. “For fucks sake,” he reappeared back around where we were, and started to urge us on. “Isn’t it time you start getting yourself off to school? You’ll miss the bus if you don’t, won’t you?” He was answered by all of us grabbing at the lunchboxes around us, but as we picked them up, there was a sinking filling in my chest as I realized how light the box was. Leah opened her box and looked up at dad. “Mom’s forgotten!” “Well, grab a piece of bread from the bread cabinet and a fruit from the fridge then. You don’t have much time for more than that or you’ll miss the bloody bus.” We did as we were told and started out the door, meanwhile Jenna saying “That’s just messed up!” She often said words stronger than that, but not around dad. Dad would be really mad at her if he heard half the words she used. So, after reading class, we were at lunch, and I had opened my lunch to a long piece of bread with creamy peanut butter spread on the inside as a filling, and an orange, but my thermos was empty. All around me, everyone was talking and eating, and the sandwich was dry. The orange had to be peeled, and I was kind of clumsy at that, and knew I’d get the orange’s juice all over, so after a couple of bites of the bread, I set it down. Sometimes, I felt like the stupidest kid in the whole school, and maybe even the whole country or even the whole world. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t stay out of trouble, and I had trouble speaking up when things were not going the way I needed them to. I just sat there, my bread in my lunchbox again, and looked around at the others starting to finish up their lunches around me. I would never touch Ally’s stuff, the girl that shared the same desk-table with me. That would certainly be trouble. But as everyone started to leave the class to go play, I noticed that another girl across the walkway between the desks, the table just over from me, had left her seat. She still had her thermos out and her cup part was still off of it, but it was empty. I looked at the door, but it had been a few minutes since she left. Maybe she had gone out to play forgetting to put her thermos away. Yeah, we lived in a very rural area, and so we didn’t even have a proper lunchroom in our school. We just ate at our desks, and most of the kids packed lunches from home, though the district did bring in extra brown bags for those that didn’t bring a lunch from home. I wasn’t sure how you got those though because we had always grown up bringing a bag from our house as far back as I could remember. The other girl didn’t come back in after at least ten minutes, and by this time, nearly all the desks were empty and nearly all the others had put away their lunchboxes. I mean, if she wasn’t going to come back, and if she had any left at all, then maybe it’d be okay, right? I reached across after checking that no one was watching me, and I first took her cup and put it in front of me. No one cared. Then I reached for her thermos. Still, no one cared. I poured half a cup in, and then looked around as I put the main thermos back. Still no one cared. I sighed. I thought I was going to get away with it when suddenly, before I picked the cup up from my desk where I had poured into it from, three of the boys in my class came running through, and because the seats were very close together, they bumped my desk, hard as they ran past, and the cup spilled sliding down the desk to my lap and got my shorts all wet! I stood up and ran out of the room, thinking of going to the toilet to see how bad the damage was there, and to see if I could deal with it, or if I’d have to go get clothes from the lost and found, when I came upon the fifth graders hanging out by their classroom door. “It’s your sister,” a carrot hair colored girl with green eyes said and then I saw my sister Leah took around the corner at me. “Did she just piss her pants?” the other friend that was hanging with her asked. “Probably,” Leah didn’t defend me at all. “She’s always doing that.” I felt my heart ache and ran out of there, not even stopping at the toilets, but instead, just running out of the building, and to the back wall, where there was this concrete block put there so we could step on it to get over the wall to chase a ball that went astray. I jumped over it, and ran until I was alone and slumped against a tree. I didn’t always wet my pants! Why did Leah say that? I never did that. Okay, I had trouble wetting the bed at night, but I didn’t do it in the daytime! Why was everything so hard? Why didn’t we have proper lunches packed this morning? Why couldn’t I read right? Why was my pants wet and everyone accusing me of being a baby? Why? I just couldn’t help having a nice long cry. When they had found me, dad had already been called and was on his way to the office while I was taken back, and having been accused of peeing my pants by my sister, and of stealing one of my classmate’s lunch but I wasn’t sure who snitched about the thermos. So when my dad came in and saw me wearing wet shorts, he just shook his head and nodded at the principal at whatever was said. “You’re always in trouble, aren’t you?” he finally said something to me after we had been in the car for a few minutes and he had driven away from the school. “Taking your classmates lunches, now, are you?” I just looked down. Trying to tell him that it wasn’t her lunch I took exactly didn’t seem like it was going to sound any better to him. “We feed you, don’t we?” he asked irritation in his voice. “You had a lunch.” My eyes watered. I nodded but I wanted to say “Not a drink.” I don’t know what held my mouth closed, well, I did, but I wasn’t sure exactly why I was scared. He’d never really hit, hit. He spanked sometimes, but he’d never hit anyone, that I knew of. Still, I was scared and could only look down. Maybe I was scared because I knew I had stolen no matter what it was that I took. “Are you wanting to end up in jail by the time you’re Gracie’s age?” he suddenly asked me though he had to keep his eyes straight on the road. I could hear it in his voice though. His eyes were narrowed, and he was very disappointed. “Did you hear me? Do you want to go to jail?” I felt my eyes watering as he drove on and I shook my head. “I can’t hear you,” he said his voice growing more agitated by the sound of it. “No?” I whimpered. “Fighting with a fifth grader last week, stealing a classmate’s lunch today, skipping class a month ago…,” he trailed off telling me how much I had been in trouble at school lately. “I don’t know what we are going to do with you.” I shivered. “You know what, I need a drink,” he finally said. “Now, you are not to touch anything, and sit quietly, got it?” I nodded. He drove to one of his favorite places, at least I think it’s one of his favorite places. They had tables everywhere, and it seemed like a small restaurant, only there were thick smoke fumes everywhere, and instead of food on the tables, people were holding cards and they all had serious looks on their faces. Dad dropped me off by the door, and I sat in a chair holding my stuffed rhino that I often kept in the car while dad went to the long counter thing and spoke with people seated there, and he started to drink a bit. I don’t know how long I was there, but by the time dad walked by me, saying “Let’s go,” my shorts were already dried out from the spill earlier, and my eyes were heavy with boredom and I was actually starting to fall asleep when he said something. The place had been so dim, that it wasn’t hard to start to sleep, and despite all the rough serious faces around, it seemed pretty chill and quiet. We’d gotten in the car, and we started the drive home. The bus rides were always quite long, though I wasn’t sure exactly how long they took. Dad, however, had gone the opposite way from home to go get a drink, so we had to drive even further back, though we weren’t stopping here and there to let different people out. I felt my eyes half closing as we exited the main part of town. It had been a really long day, and I was exhausted from it all. Our house was pretty far out into the country from town, and as we left the city behind, the sky started to dim. I stared out the window, and though dad wasn’t exactly mad anymore, I wondered if he was still going to punish me. Other than yelling at me so far, he hadn’t really done anything yet, or told me just what they were doing to do. The clouds in the sky were starting to disappear into the darkening sky. There was some light left, enough to see the trees and the grass at the side of the road, but that was quickly dimming too. I sighed. Surprisingly, I saw this tall woman with a narrow kind of long face walking along the road. As far from town as we were, I was a bit surprised to see anyone walking out there, but then, after we passed her, maybe driving about a fifty feet from where she still walked, the car slowed and dad stopped. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that woman before and didn’t know why dad was stopping, but before I could come to any realization of what this could mean, she had opened the door, and gotten in. She didn’t look very happy. “What?” dad asked her as though he knew she was irritated at something that maybe he could fix. She didn’t answer his question though, and instead, looked back towards me. “So which one is this one?” “That’s my troublemaker,” daddy told her. She looked back at dad. “So, first you stand me up, then I find out you have her with you, and now, you don’t even stop next to me, but look like you are going to ignore me before you decide to stop?” “Look,” my dad turned and looked at her for a moment and then back at the road. “We had a bit of a problem at school, didn’t we?” I nodded at him when I saw his face looking at me in the mirror. “I had to go get her, and well, I had to cool off because she was really in trouble this time, so I lost track of the time while I was relaxing a bit. I didn’t expect to see you walking to my house, though. You know I’ve asked you not to come there.” “And why is that?” “You’ll scare my children,” daddy told her. “My wife knows about us, and she’s okay with it, but she says not to bring you to the house.” “Then what are you doing driving me along then?” “I’ll just drop her off at the gate, and then take you home,” dad told her. “Your kid smells,” the unfriendly woman told him. “I know,” daddy told her. “But it’s kind of immature of you to bring that up with her sitting right there. Don’t you think I’m attentive enough to know if my kid has pissed her pants or not?” “Oh, is that what I’m smelling?” “Likely,” dad told her. “Her teacher at school told me she’s pissed herself on top of getting in trouble. But like I said, you didn’t need to bring it up. She’ll get a bath when she gets home.” I closed my eyes trying to block out what they were talking about. I didn’t piss my pants! The teacher was wrong, and daddy didn’t even say anything about that when he brought up all the bad stuff I did over the last month earlier, so I thought he had ignored the fact the teacher said it, but now, I wasn’t so sure he didn’t believe I didn’t wet. He just told the woman that I had. I could feel tears stinging behind my closed eyes. I felt my face on fire, and I shook with strong emotions and wondered to myself why I had thought I could get away with even a little drink from the girl’s thermos next to me…. I walked into the dimly lit cavernous little hall before the kitchen and dropped my book bag and hung up my jacket. I looked into the little bathroom to one side from the little hall and saw it empty before walking around and into the dim kitchen. We had a really old house, so some of the rooms were a bit darker. “There you are,” Mom had come from the other direction where the living room was, and in there, I could see my sisters watching something on the television. “So, where is your father?” “He said that….” I looked down not sure what I was really supposed to say. Daddy told me not to cause trouble by mentioning the lady when he dropped me at the end of our driveway, about a good five minute walk from the house by the mailbox, so I looked down trying to think. “Your dad didn’t come all the way home with you then?” she asked. I just looked down. “Did he at least drop you at the mailbox?” she asked a little concerned. I nodded. “He did.” “Well, I guess that’s alright then,” I heard her breath out as though flustered. “You need a bath.” I continued to look down. I guessed by now, everyone thought I had peed my shorts. I was in the bathroom, and standing there, waiting against the sink, scared to touch anything until my older sister, Gracie came in. Her green-blue eyes narrowed at me, and her broad face with light curly brown hair seemed to concentrate at my shorts for a minute. I nervously bit at my lip waiting for her to say something. “You really pissed your pants at school?” she asked me. “No,” I said though I mumbled it more than said it loudly. I was scared she’d tell mom I was lying since no one else believed me. “Tell me what happened,” she said pulling me by the hand so she could sit on the toilet as a chair while she started to undress me. “It’s not like you to piss your pants, so tell me what really happened, okay?” I nodded. Gracie was pretty smart when it came to taking care of my sisters and me, so I should have known she’d be the one person that would believe me, and by the time she had me undressed, I had told her the whole story. “Well, we don’t want mom to think you are lying to me, and I don’t want to get punished for not doing what mom said, so I’ll have to treat you like you did it,” she told me. “But I want you to know, I believe you. Although, honestly, I’d rather be cleaning you up because you really did piss your pants, than because of a misunderstanding because your stealing something went wrong.” I nodded. “Did dad say what your punishment will be for stealing and pissing your pants?” “No. He just told me I’d been bad over the last month, and he said he didn’t know what to do.” Gracie smiled at me. “Well, maybe I can talk to dad before he decides what to do. You know he sometimes listens to me. I might be able to smooth it over. You didn’t actually take anything that the other girl wanted, right?” I looked down. “I’m not sure if she wanted it, but she had gone out to play, and there was just a little bit left. I think she forgot about it, so probably didn’t miss it.” “I’ll make the lunches tomorrow, and make sure you have a drink. Is that okay with you?” Gracie asked. I nodded. “I’m not mom though. Don’t get mad if I get something wrong, okay?” “I promise,” I told Gracie. I never really looked at Gracie like she was really that much older than me before, but right now, with only her believing I didn’t pee my pants at school, with her knowing that I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and was just thirsty, and her offing to make the lunches for us as a way to try to calm me while she washed me like mom wanted her to, I really thought I saw for the first time how her being fourteen years old was a lot different than me being eight. It was no wonder mom always had her looking after my little sister, Katie-Beth, who was only turning six this year and in kindergarten at the moment. I was brought down to the table in a long shirt and a thick heavy pair of cloth panties on underneath. My mom always put me in those when I had wet the bed the night before this time, and not only had I done that, but everyone thought I had peed my pants at school, too. There was one plate of food on the table because everyone else had eaten dinner while daddy was out drinking with me brought along to melt away the stress of the school’s constant complaints about me. Before I knew it, Gracie had brought me to the room I shared with Katie-Beth since we were the younger sisters, and seeing that my bed was still stripped of the top blankets, and the shameful wet spot on the sheets was still there from me wetting the night before, Gracie sighed. “Mom really is getting a bit winded and absentminded about things lately. I am starting to think this pregnancy is worse for her than the one with Katie-Beth.” I looked up at her, and then back at my blanket-less bed with the huge wet spot. I supposed I was going to sleep there, when Gracie took my hand and walked me to the other room where Jenna and Leah shared a bed and Gracie had her own bed. “I’m putting Samantha with me tonight,” she told my other two older sisters. “But you know Katie-Beth is going to get scared, so I need one of you to sleep with her tonight.” “Why can’t Samantha just sleep in her own bed?” Leah complained. Of course, with her being the youngest of the older sisters, it was likely she’s be the one stuck sleeping in there, so I couldn’t blame her. “Because she can’t,” Gracie told her. “Now, Jenna…,” and I could see the dawning look on Jenna’s face as she realized that Leah wasn’t the one that was going to have to go to our room. “Mom has forgotten to clean up Sammy’s bed, and if you are scared of Katie-Beth having an accident, I’m sure I can talk her into wearing some training panties just for the night, but she needs someone that’s going to be nice to her, and I can’t trust Leah to be nice when she is being forced to sleep in there in the first place, but you are older and I think you can be a bit more mature, can’t you?” Jenna frowned. “Did you even ask mom what should be done?” Gracie sighed. “Girls, mom is in no condition to decide right now. You saw how tired she was today. She didn’t make the lunches this morning because she’s exhausted. She didn’t clean up Samantha’s bed because she’s getting forgetful because she’s doing everything herself. We need to give her a break. Understand?” Katie-Beth came to the door of their bedroom by this time. “Samantha’s not in there with me,” she put a finger in her mouth as she thought about what we were doing. “I know,” Gracie told her. “But Samantha’s bed is still wet, and she has no dry place to sleep tonight.” Katie looked down. “I am trying to make arrangements so someone can sleep with you.” “You could sleep with her,” Jenna told Gracie. “Sure. I could. But then you are going to sleep in my bed with Sammy.” “Ew! Sammy will pee on me.” “Well, you either sleep with Katie-Beth or with Sammy. Your choice.” “I’ll… I’ll sleep with Katie then.” “Wait, you really going to put Sammy in bed with you?” Leah asked. “Unless you are volunteering…,” Gracie looked over at her. “You could just put her in your bed and sleep with me or something.” “No, I don’t want to do that tonight.” “Why?” “Trust me, she needs someone to comfort her tonight.” Both Jenna and Leah looked at me, and they seemed to be looking a little less judgmental and a little more concerned as they tried to search what was wrong. “I don’t get it,” Leah told Gracie. “She’s just wet her pants at school. Why is it any different than wetting the bed, and what’s going on?” “Girls, you don’t seem to understand. Everyone is calling Sammy a liar every time she says something about it, but she’s never lied before, at least not to me. And everyone thinks she is so terrible because she got thirsty, but Leah, didn’t you ask a classmate if she could share a cup of her drink with you?” Leah looked down. “I did.” “Jenna, didn’t a teacher buy you a milk when he saw you had nothing to drink with your lunch?” “Um…. Yeah, I guess?” “You all know how Sammy is. She doesn’t exactly have any friends to help her, and her teacher didn’t notice, so what is so different from what you did and what she did? Only that she did it without permission as far as I reckon.” The girls looked down. “I’m not saying you are bad,” she told her sisters. “I’m just saying maybe she had a reason, and maybe she really didn’t piss herself at school. Maybe the drink got spilled on her like she told me it did when I was bathing her.” The girls frowned. “Oh.” “So no more calling her a thief or a pee pants, okay?” The girls nodded. “Now, I want Sammy to feel loved tonight, so she’s sleeping with me unless you want your bed wet, Jenna.” She shook her head no. “I want her to feel better, but I don’t want her diaper leaking on our bed.” “Then I want you, Jenna, to sleep with Katie-Beth, and if you are scared she’ll wet the bed, I’ll talk her into wearing a pair of training undies for the night, and I’ll put Sammy in bed with me.” Jenna took Katie-Beth by the hand and led her back to our room, and I supposed she was going to sleep with her, but it looked like Gracie was going back with them, probably to put a the shameful panties on poor Katie. She never wet the bed, though. It was kind of mean to make her pay for my mistakes. Gracie was back a bit faster than I expected though, and she said “Arms up,” before I registered what she was doing. I looked over at Leah, but then saw Leah looking back at Gracie a little confused, so I looked back and noticed she a plastic pair of panties and some towels on the bed. I looked back up at Gracie. “Just because I think you need a little extra attention tonight doesn’t mean I want my bed wet,” she explained to me. “I’m going to stuff your panties a bit with a towel, and put some towels under you to try to keep my bed dry. Understand?” I looked down. “I’ll try not to wet the bed tonight,” I promised. “No, Sammy,” Gracie came and hugged me. “I don’t accept that because I don’t think you ever mean to wet the bed at night. Wetting is not your fault. I just don’t want my bed wet, so do what I ask, okay?” I nodded. “Good. Now arms up, okay?” I lifted my arms, and she took off my sleeping shirt so it was out of the way, and then she pulled down my panties. “I’m going to put a towel in your panties to try to absorb some of the pee,” Gracie told me as she started to adjust it. “And I want to pull your panties up and then stuff some towels inside the plastic panties, but it’s going to make it awkward to use the toilet, so I want you to wake me if you want to use the toilet so I can help you.” I nodded. I don’t know what time it was when I woke up a little later, but Gracie was sleeping. She said she’d take my plastic panties off me, and the towels that were inside my panties and my plastic panties, so I got carefully out of bed, and took them out of the plastic myself. I didn’t want to wake her. She was being really nice to me, and I know she didn’t want me to wet her bed, so I’d be careful and put it back just the way she had it. I’m not that dumb. I can do it. I walked out into the dark hall and saw that dad and mom were still up, and they were talking, more mom to dad. I slipped into the toilet, and went. When I came out of the bathroom, I heard mom. “Dan…, can you please put down your horses for a minute.” “Fine. What do you want?” “Well, I’m trying to figure out what I’ll say in the letter.” “Alright?” “Well, how long do you want them to keep her for?” “They can keep her as long as they like.” “Is that what I’ll say then?” “I don’t know. They’re your people, ain’t they?” “You are some help of a man, you know that?” “Look, just say whatever you want, just like you usually do. It’s no bother what you say.” The conversation seemed to end, and I wondered what they were talking about. I knew that my mom’s cousins had a big farm, and we had a cow about to have a baby soon. Maybe they were going to help by keeping the cow for a bit or something? I sighed and went back into the room and started to stuff the towel, first down my cloth panties, but Gracie opened her eyes. “Samantha, didn’t I tell you I’d do that?” I frowned and looked over at her. “If you leak after redoing that yourself, I’ll think it’s your fault for messing with it when I told you to wake me.” I stood there, looking down. She had a right to think that, I guess. “On the other hand, if I fix your panties, and you leak, then it’s my fault,” she told me. “I know you pee the bed, and I let you sleep in mine anyway, and if I fix your bed-wetting stuff, and arrange the towels, then it will be my fault if it leaks.” I nodded. She got up and came over and pulled my panties all the way down, even the cotton ones underneath, and made me just lift my nightshirt so she could see what she was doing. Once I was fixed, she helped me back into bed, and she put an arm around me as I fell asleep. The next morning, I felt her getting out of bed, and I opened my eyes. “Just relax. It’s not time yet, Samantha.” As she stood though, I saw her panties were pretty wet, and then I felt the bedding around me, and noticed that some of pee had escaped the towels and the plastic pants. Of course, I knew why she had put the towels under me. My plastic panties had a lot of holes in it, so of course, that’s why my bed sometimes got leaked on. These plastic panties were probably at least a couple of years old. I felt around though, wondering how badly I got her bed. She saw me feeling around. “Do you want a bath, too?” she asked me. I nodded. “Come on, then.” And putting an arm around me, she took me to the bathroom to clean me up and herself. We were at the breakfast table a while later, and the sheets from my bed and from Gracie’s bed were hanging outside. Of course my sisters knew what that meant, but when mom looked out and saw the two sets of sheets, he looked right at Gracie. “Did Katie-Beth?” she started. “No mom, I did.” “You?” “Yeah. I don’t know what happened, but I cleaned it up, and I got Sammy in case she was wet, and we both had a bath, and I washed out both of our sheets.” Mom nodded just accepting it, though both Jenna and Leah looked a bit confused at Gracie until mom left the room. “Look, I’m not going to tell mom that Sammy did it in my bed,” she told them. “I invited her to stay with me, and I’ll not see her get a whooping for peeing on someone else’s bed, especially if she was told to sleep there because her own bed was not ready for her.” The girls nodded. A few days passed, and it being on a Saturday, I forget where my sisters were, but probably just playing around here and there or maybe at their friends’ houses. I just remember I was at home, with Katie-Beth, and mom was watching television with Katie in the living room. “Samantha,” she called for me from where I was at the table trying to do some homework. “Yeah?” “Go get the mail,” she told me. It was around noon or so. I nodded and glad to have a reason to take a break, I left the table and skipped down the drive for the five minute walk to the mailbox. When I got there, it was still empty, so to delay getting back to the reading that I really despised, I waited a few minutes for the mailman to come up on his motorbike. “It’s just the one, then,” he said as I looked up into the kind brown eyes of our usual carrier. Running back so mom wouldn’t think I dawdled on purpose, I walked through the door and held out the letter over my head. “You’ve got a letter.” I sat back down at the table, and started to read again, when mom came over and took her letter to read herself. I was struggling with another longer word, when mom interrupted. “Samantha,” she looked over at me with a frown and her eyes tightening as though focusing on something. “Yeah?” I asked still looking at my reading book. “Close your book.” I nodded and was glad to close it. “If you haven’t guessed already, daddy and I have decided not to punish you for your behavior a couple of days ago. Things have been hard around here for everyone, and you being only a child, of course you acted out. You need attention sometimes, and we can’t always give you what you need, honey.” I looked down. I didn’t steal because I needed attention. I just needed a drink. And I don’t even think that girl even cared. “I can see the stress getting to even Gracie,” mom went on talking to me. “She’s peed in her sleep a couple of nights ago, and that might be because she’s been trying too hard to help me.” I frowned. She didn’t pee the bed. I did. She told me not to say anything because she was afraid I’d get it for something I didn’t mean to do, and for her telling me to sleep in her bed. “Your dad and I have written to my cousin. She doesn’t live that far away.” I nodded. “You haven’t seen her in a while, but she says she’d be glad to keep you for the summer until mommy can get back on her feet.” I started to get tears in my eyes. “The other older girls are going to be needed around the farm because your dad has gotten a temporary job for the summer to help us get back on our feet,” mom was explaining. “I’d send Katie-Beth with you, but she’s still a bit young to be without mommy.” I nodded. “Now, I grew up with Shelley, so I know she’ll take good care of you until the end of the summer. By then, the baby will be settled, dad will be back home, and your older sisters will not have to be in the fields so much anymore.” I sighed. There was no way around this. They probably would have had me help on the farm, but as daddy told the lady, I’m the troublemaker. They didn’t need the troublemaker making things that were already hard, more difficult for everyone. “So…, am I going next week?” I asked. “No, honey, they’ll be expecting you tomorrow. There is no reason to continue trying to finish your reading assignment. You won’t be going to school next week.” I sighed. I felt a little bit of pain in my chest as I tried to swallow my tears. I was leaving the next day, and they just now told me? Did they even tell my sisters? I'm sorry about the rewrite, but felt like it was an awkward read when I reread what I had. I had also seemed to forgotten to change some stuff back again, after I tried to correct it above. So, this is hopefully the final draft of chapter one. I'm going to be trying to get chapter two out either today before I go to sleep in about 5 or 6 hours, or by tomorrow night at the latest. Thank you to those that discussed with me to remind me about the diaper situation in 1980. I do want to make this authentic, as much as possible, and while I as about 9 years old in 1980, I guess 9 year old kids sometimes don't see exactly everything clearly, and I also have a foggy memory at times, too. So between both of those things, I am willing to admit I was just wrong and try to rewrite it so it is the best I can do. Again, thank you: Brian, WBDaddy, Babyqtboy, Kaikochan, and Parkintochter.

Okay, well, I hope the cloth route I went kind of fixes the immersion for those of you who remember the 80s better than I do. I turned ten in 1980, so I'm not sure, and that wasn't until December, so you know, nine year olds don't always see they think they see. What about pampers Cruisers? I seem to recall something like that for 6 to 8 year olds? Though they were targeted more to the 2-4 year olds?

I've corrected the top to reflect the cotton panties and then how Gracie fixed them but they still leaked. I'll have to explain how it leaked later though.

That's probably what I'm thinking of. Thank you.

Huggies didn't, but they had some cheap stuff for kids. I don't remember what it was called. It was an underpants style thing that you pulled up though, and they often did put plastic pants on over it. However, my memory could just be off. I never used them, and my parents thought they were a waste of money, so I might be misremembering, and they might have been just talking about regular diapers, not sure. I did do a search for it, and I do notice that the internet says that pull ups were not ever a thing before 1989, and that seems really off to me since I remember my siblings having problems way before that. That was the year before I graduated, and I remember seeing something like underpants-like when I was in elementary school, but I might have just been confused. I don't know. that said, since it seems my memory could be flawed, I will have to go through the story and rethink it. I do want it to be closer to the way it was, so if my memory is flawed, we'll do something else for the idea of pull ups, just not sure what yet.

She is wearing pull ups in the first chapter, though pull ups in the 1980s were not as good as the things you can get today, especially for the older kids.