Lucy
Father wasn’t Mother’s first love. I didn’t know this until she was dying. She died slowly, so she had lots of time for deathbed reminiscences. Most were about her childhood on her family’s farm, and how desperately she’d wanted to escape her father, our tiny, hunchbacked Grandfather Roberts, whom I barely remembered, so long had he been dead. Lilith and I ignored those stories; they didn’t interest us. But this one did interest me, so I listened.
His name was Samuel. I never heard the family name, but he was a Williamsburg boy. They were the star pupils of the one-room schoolhouse that used to sit on First Street, and when they were in the upper grades the teacher often asked them to stay after school to help her. He lived in town, but every day he walked her home to her family’s f
