Dear Brother, You Loved Me Too Late novel · Chapter 10 of 24
Chapter 10: Her Grave
The Evanston cemetery was white and silent on Sunday morning, and Angie walked through it alone.
Dixon had driven her to the gate and parked in the lot.
"I'll be right here," he had said. "Take as long as you need."
She had told him she needed ten minutes.
Her mother's grave was near the back, under a bare oak, with a flat grey stone half drifted over with snow.
She knelt and brushed it clear with her glove.
It read Beloved Wife and Mother, with two dates twenty-nine years apart.
Angie had been here every November since she was ten, on her own, by bus.
She had never once said a word out loud.
She took the photographs out of her pocket and unfolded them, printed that morning at the library.
She did not read the whole chart.
She went straight to the last line, and her breath caught, and she had to stop and wait for it.
"I will not trade her," she said. "That's what you said."
The wind moved in the oak branches.
"I'm not sorry," Angie said. "I've been sorry my whole life, and I'm done. You picked me. That's not a thing I did to you. That's a thing you did for me."
Her eyes stung.
"I'm dying of what you had, Mom. They say it's the same gene. I won't get to be older than you were." She laughed, shakily. "But I'm not sorry. I wanted you to know."
She stayed there on her knees with the snow soaking through her jeans.
A car door closed somewhere behind her, heavy and expensive.
She knew the sound of that door.
Footsteps crunched along the path, unhurried.
"I wondered when you'd find your way here," her father said.
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