Kate

She liked, when she could stand to, to remember Kate the other way. Not the four days. The years before the four days, when Kate was the sharpest and most alive person in any room she entered, and did not suffer fools, and loved Laura with a fierce dry unsentimental love that Laura had not known to be grateful for until it was gone.

Grandma Kate had taught high-school mathematics for forty years and she had the manner of it in her to the end, the way of laying a hard thing out plain and waiting, not unkindly, for you to catch up. She had come out to Wyoming from California as a girl, against the whole weight of her own family, to get an education they told her a woman had no business wanting, and she had gotten it, and she had never once in her life let anyone tell her what she could not have. Laura had understood only later what a rare thing that had made her, in that time and that place, a woman who bent to nothing. Her mother had come from that. Whatever in Annie had studied the end of the world without flinching had come up out of Kate first.