Plain seeing

When Lucy was fifteen, her mother died. Everything that has followed - her education, husband, and child - has been "after the fact." Her perennial grief is compounded by a sense of never having really known her mother, who ran away to California, then came home pregnant at seventeen. Did she really love Lucy? Could she have struggled harder to live? Lucy has only the image of her mothers stepping down from a train into her own mother's arms, and her memories of an enigmatic, melancholy woman. How often she has thought, I wish there were more to know. More to tell. The reader does know more.…