The once-noisy house fell deathly quiet.
Shards covered the floor. A draft whistled through the gap around the door.
Mom sat alone, sunk into the old couch.
She looked around the empty living room, then at the family photograph on the table.
Suddenly, she began to giggle, an erratic, unsettling sound.
"Go on, then. Don't any of you come back."
She walked to the table and tore Dad's and Hugo's faces out of the photograph, leaving only herself and me.
Clutching the remaining half to her chest, she murmured, "It's all right. Enid's still here.
"Enid's a good girl. She'll never leave me."
During his first month doing manual labor at the town's old brickworks, Dad was moving a load when a stack of unfired bricks collapsed and broke his thighbone.
The town hospital barely saved his lif
