Chapter 18

I spent the rest of the night sitting in front of the laptop with the Chrome browser open Googling for ... well it seemed like everything, because there was so much I felt ignorant about.

I did remember to throw Edwina's casserole in the oven. There was a post-it note on top with the cooking instructions. Probably something 27 year old Cooper would have needed, but a casserole is a casserole for a man my age, so in the oven for an hour at 350. I had some tomatoes and cheese that I had sliced up so I added a few slices of each and a nice ripe orange that I peeled and sectioned, and that was my dinner. Tomatoes had been a real luxury when I was younger, and again later in life. Today's tomatoes looked better but didn't taste it, generally, but these I'd found were very good, so I was reliving my youth a little bit by having them this way, just sliced, salted and peppered and with a slice of cheese.

The casserole was good. The beans and rice had been spiced up with some Cajun spices and there were little bits of pork and shrimp in it as well as corn and diced onions and peppers. I rubbed my belly when I was done and thought about how I'd been eating since I''d awoken in Cooper's body.

"Better start exercising," I said aloud to myself. Maybe I could get some sort of exercise equipment for that big empty space in the basement.

After dinner I went back upstairs and took another shower. After I was clean and had brushed my teeth I decided to take a closer look at the stuff I'd found in the upstairs office. There were several large photo albums as well as a large box filled with old Kodak film packages – the kind you used to get from the photo shop when you had your film developed, as well as some framed pictures that had been covered with soft, pillowcase-like covers to protect them.

I started with the Kodak packages, opening a few and thumbing through them. They were the typical family pictures, Cooper, His parents, family friends and other children. Birthday parties, holidays, vacations – exactly what you would expect.

The two photo albums appeared to be more Mr. and Mrs. James' pictures from before they were married. The first one was Mr. James' and I saw a collection of pictures that were arranged chronologically from oldest to newest. The last few pages were pictures of Mr. James in college, and then wedding pictures showing him and Mrs. James. They had been a very photogenic couple. Mr. James cut a dashing figure and Mrs. James was very beautiful. I could see Cooper's features in both of them.

Out of curiosity, I opened the other album from the back to see if the pictures there were also of the wedding, and sure enough, they were. Several of the wedding pictures were even identical, shared between the families, obviously, and taken by someone who had been hired to photograph the event.

Several of these had featured the entire wedding party, including both sets of parents, and I could see where Mrs. James got her looks, as her mother was a lovely woman as well, though there was something about her I couldn't put a finger on that made my eyes linger.

I worked my way back through the album and saw Mrs. James grow younger and younger and her mother did as well. Grandmother James as I began to think of her struck me oddly, for some reason.

It wasn't until I got almost to the beginning of the album that it began to come to me, and that sent me scrambling back to the box tearing the cloth covers off of the framed pictures there, but those proved to be the final proof, and I sat stunned for many long minutes.

The connection was made clear now. I stared at the portrait of three women, a young Mrs. James between an older woman holding her by the shoulders and an even older, gray-haired woman standing beside them. The gray-haired woman was Rebecca Worthington and the younger woman was Cooper's grandmother. Now I understood as well why Mrs. James' younger pictures kept drawing my attention. The features she shared were obvious, once I knew to look for them, and those features on her mother were even more so. The features she shared with Harley Scoville.

Rebecca had given me a daughter all those years ago. Cooper James was my own Great Grandson! For the first time in my life, both of them, I fainted from the shock of something.