“Grandma, who’s Evie?”

PART 3

There are things you think you have survived because you have stopped speaking about them.

Then somebody puts an old photograph in your hands and you discover that silence was not the same as healing.

I sat Poppy at the kitchen table with her coloring book and called my neighbor, Mrs.

Alvarez.

She had lived next door for twenty years and knew when not to ask questions.

I asked her to sit with Poppy while I spoke to a visitor on the porch.