Purebred by Bonnie Bryant Read Free Book Online Page B

next, without anybody really knowing why. Weren’t any immunizations or medicines—weren’t hardly any doctors. Even when I was a child—I had a sister, you know.”
    “You did?” Carole tried to remember what she knew about Grand Alice’s family. She didn’t actually remember anything, brothers or sisters.
    “I had two brothers and one sister, but all I remember of my sister is her casket”—she held her hands apart—“just this big. I was four years old and my whole arm swelled up from my shoulder to my fingertips, and no one knew why. The doctor came to operate on me, right on top of our kitchen table. He cut into my arm to drain the swelling. As I was lying on that table, just before he put me out with the ether, I looked into the other room and saw that little casket. That was my sister. She was two years old and her name was Sophie, and that’s all I can remember of her.”
    Grand Alice pushed up the sleeve of her dress. “See here.” Carole saw a thick, dark scar on the older woman’s arm. “From the surgery,” Grand Alice said.
    “But how …” Carole was confused. “How can that happen, and how can people forget? I mean, your sister …” She didn’t know how to say what she meant.
    “People forget. Families forget. We’re lucky, Carole, because our family told stories, and so we know an awful lot about our history. But that’s why it’s so important to keepon telling the stories. Take little Sophie—I’m the last person left alive that ever saw her. My parents were poor. They couldn’t afford photographs. They never had one taken of Sophie. I didn’t have one taken of myself until I was seventeen.” She shuffled through the old black album. “Here it is.”
    Carole smiled to see Grand Alice in a long ruffled dress, her hair piled intricately on top of her head. She was wearing thin, wire-rimmed glasses. “When did you start needing glasses?” she asked. Grand Alice wore them now; she needed them most of the time, but sometimes they hung around her neck on a thin silver chain.
    At this, Grand Alice laughed long and hard. “Not until I was sixty years old and my eyes started to wear out,” she said. “Carole, back then eyeglasses were the fashion. That pair just had pieces of glass.”
    Carole was more resolved than ever to pay close attention to her family history. These stories were important.
    Grand Alice went through the rest of the old photos carefully, and Carole took voracious notes. The newer albums were filled with snapshots, and here Grand Alice sped up the pace. “When cameras got cheap enough that people all had their own, they took a lot more pictures. And let’s be honest, some of them aren’t all that interesting.”
    She hurried past old landscape shots from trips taken long ago, then slowed down again when she came to Carole’smother’s childhood. “Here’s your momma.” There was Carole’s mother as a baby lying naked on her changing table; sitting in her high chair with food all over her face and hair; wide-eyed with excitement in front of a flocked Christmas tree.
    There she was again, playing with John and Elaine in the snow in front of the farmhouse—Carole was surprised to see that the house looked just the same—or, a little older now, running with her brother and sister along a rocky beach.
    Then came a posed shot of the children together, a tiny baby lying across Elaine’s lap. “That’s Jessie,” Carole guessed. In the pictures, the children grew up and graduated from high school and then college. John appeared in a football uniform, and Jessie as a gangly cross-country runner in a pale blue tracksuit.
    Then there were pictures of Carole’s mother and father together. Carole giggled. “I’ve never seen my father with that much hair.”
    Grand Alice nodded. “First thing the Marines did was shave it all off.”
    Then there was a picture Carole recognized from a copy they had at home: her parents together, holding an infant