Goodbye

The years took the rest of The Before from her a little at a time, until the good life was only a set of pictures she could no longer be sure she had not made up. But she never lost the last day with her mother. That one stayed whole. She had gone over it so many times it should have worn smooth like the others and it never did. It stayed sharp. She thought it stayed sharp on purpose, that some things a body refuses to let go soft because going soft would be a kind of losing them twice.

It had been more than five years since Annie left them at the airport in Denver and got on a plane going east, and sent Laura and Henry north into Wyoming with Papa Joe, to camp, without her.