Or would I still have chosen Harry over my own mother? She’d never know, not for sure, because hindsight never worked. No one could return to the past, and speculating about what could’ve gone down a different path failed to help anyone. It wouldn’t ease the pain at her loss or temper the grief at all. Mama never saw her grandson, not even a picture. Maybe she should’ve written more letters, made it a point to have George’s portrait taken by the photographer in town. She’d failed both Jamie and Mama by not having such a simple thing done. Now they’d both spend eternity without any notion of what George, son and grandson, looked like. The weekly letters exchanged no longer seemed enough. I should’ve written every single day. I could’ve saved up the egg money and went down to Texas to visit on the train. I just never thought about Mama dying or I would’ve done it. She attended a funeral long ago for a distant relative Maude hadn’t really known, and she remembered a preacher there. He’d walked up to her after the brief service and intoned, “Life is like a basket of eggs. Break one and it’s gone.” His words frightened her and she hadn’t understood what the man meant. With two major losses, husband and parent, in the span of a few months, Maude got it. Life could be so fleeting and fragile. Fate or God or whatever you could call it took away without remorse—and sometimes gave. Maude had a son and she had Harry, but anything could happen to either of them. The flu could creep in with bony fingers of death to snatch them away and she couldn’t stop it. Maude wept until she became too tired to sob anymore. It took too much effort. Her eyes were matted almost shut and her head ached. One minute she burned, too hot, and the next she shivered cold. Her stomach hurt and she wanted to lie down to sleep for a day or two. At the same time she longed to run, just bolt out into the clear night and dash like a deer along the ridges. An excess of emotion overflowed until she thought she’d burst with it.
