her once-straight posture now curved with age, but her eyes remained sharp as ever.
At eighty-three, she had survived the Great Depression, buried two husbands, raised three children, and buried my brother Robert after a car accident in his twenties.
If anyone understood life’s unpredictable cruelties and unexpected blessings, it was my mother.
“Well,” she said without preamble, lowering herself into the chair beside me, “Alice Thompson called me. Said the country club was all decorated with no bride or groom in sight. Want to tell me what’s happening?”
I
