Page 165 - My FlipBook

T R A I L O F C R U M B S

Greta tried not to laugh. That was one way of putting it.
“Sorry you had to deal with that.”
“Oh, it’s okay. It made me a nostalgic for Alice’s school
days.” He chuckled. So Alice had been a little monster too.
Passing headlights on the street drew their eyes out the
front window. Greta didn’t want to think about when the
sun would rise again. When Ash would stay and she would
go. How would she finish school now? How would he?

“I’m sorry I didn’t get any dinner made tonight,” Elgin
said. “Wasn’t feeling up to it, to be honest.”
“That’s okay. You really don’t have to.”
“But I like to. It’s just that”—he paused—“after Eleanor
died, after the cancer, I haven’t quite been myself. Alice
says I suffer from depression.” He said the word like a grade
schooler reading from a medical textbook.

“And what do you say?”
She felt him move beside her. “I don’t know if I feel
the need to sum it up in a word. That feeling though…”
He braced his hands against his knees to push himself
upright. Leaving the sentence unfinished, he picked an
empty mug off the table and started toward the kitchen.
Then stopped. “It feels like a wall between me and
everything else.”
A wall. Maybe. “I think of it more as a maze,” Greta said.

She sensed his proximity but felt okay.
“Yes, a maze.” He nodded, then slouched beside her.
“It feels like standing in the middle of a maze. You wake up,
no idea how you got there.”

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