Page 183 - My FlipBook

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

“We dug out some old pictures today,” she told him. Was it
wrong, burdening him with another dead person? “Want to
see what my mom looked like?”
“Of course.”
Greta pulled the photos off the dresser, her touch gentle.
She settled next to Elgin and showed him the photos in
the same order she’d seen them. Elgin blinked, sat a little
straighter and looked back and forth between Diana’s and

Greta’s faces. “You’re certainly your mother’s daughter.”
Greta smiled and rubbed away a fingerprint on the corner
of the picture. “This was about two years before she was diag-
nosed with cancer. She looks happy, doesn’t she?”
Elgin nodded. “She does.”
Outside on the porch, Ash smiled too—possibly even
matching the we-get-bacon smile—at something Alice said.

“The thing is”—Greta hesitated—“I wish I could remember
her like this.”
“You don’t? Too young?”
“I can’t seem to get past the time when she was sick. I
don’t remember much from before, and every time I think of
her, I remember how she suffered. I hardly recognized her.”
She swallowed.
“There are only two times in my life I have felt the
distance pain puts between people,” Elgin said. “One was

when Eleanor was in labor with Alice. I was with her, trying
to help, but she only had one foot in our world until it was
over.” He paused before saying more. “The other was near
the end of the cancer.” Elgin always called it “the cancer,”

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