Just a Little Honesty by Tracie Puckett Page B

want to look through my family photo album?”
    “Why not?” I asked, jumping over the back of the couch and landing softly on the middle cushion.
    “It wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
    “That’s not true,” I said, patting the cushion next to mine. “Come sit with me. I want to see what’s kept you so fascinated these past couple days. Show me.”
    He watched me hesitantly but eventually stood and took a seat on the couch. Careful not to brush my legs—and even more cautious about how much distance he kept between us—he looked at me from the corner of his eye.
    “Okay,” he said, opening the first page.
    There were only two pictures pressed beneath the old crinkly plastic. The first was a faded photo of a young woman—maybe in her twenties—as she stood in an open field wearing a beautiful sundress and an even prettier smile.
    “My mom,” he said, pointing to the picture. “This was a few years before she met Dad; it was about a year before she joined the force.”
    I studied the picture, and it struck me as odd that the woman was Luke’s mother. He’d only ever talked about her once, but he’d described her as nothing but rough, tough, and practically indestructible. I’d always imagined her looking a lot like her son—strong arms, tall stature, and always wearing a stern expression. But she was nothing like I’d pictured; she was petite, feminine, and far too beautiful. She had a soft face, an endearingly crooked smile, and the most beautiful brown eyes I’d ever seen.
    “Is this you?” I asked, pointing at the second picture on the page. It was yet another photo of his mother, but she was a little older and just a bit wider. Bundled in her arms and swaddled in a blue blanket, a plump, pink, newborn baby slept soundly against her chest.
    “That’s me,” he answered, trying to fight a smile. “I was a handsome devil, yeah?”
    “Yeah,” I said, silently agreeing that Luke had probably been one of the better looking babies I’d seen in my time. Of course, I wasn’t the least bit surprised. It was hard to imagine that anyone with a face like his could’ve ever been hard to look at—even as an infant.
    Luke turned the page to reveal another handful of old photographs. Most of them, as I should’ve guessed, were of his mother. Every now and then a picture would slip by that didn’t feature her front and center, but it was a rarity.
    “Who’s this?” I asked after we’d gone through the first five pages. There was a picture in the upper left corner of the page that showed an older woman—probably nearing her sixties—as she sat in a swing on the front porch of a log cabin.
    “My gran,” he said, and now his smile was wider than it’d been in days.
    I studied the picture a little closer and then looked back to Luke. “Is this…” I pointed at the cabin in the picture. “Is this the same place?”
    “One and the same. It’s where my mom grew up,” he said, throwing a glance around the cabin. “It’s nothing special, but it worked for the two of them. After Mom moved to Oakland, met Dad, and started a family, Gran considered selling the cabin and moving down south. But Mom wouldn’t let her. It was their home, you know? So, to keep Gran from getting restless and selling the place, Mom brought me up every summer to stay. It gave Gran something to look forward to, and Mom loved coming back just as much. But after Mom passed,” he said, and his chest rose with a heavy breath. “Gran just had a hard time being alone. There were just… too many memories, I guess.”
    I studied the woman’s brown-eyed stare in the photograph before I turned back to Luke. “What happened to her?”
    He almost half-laughed, but he was able to retrain it. “Florida happened to her,” he said. “She spends half of her years down south in the company of her friends, and then she comes back every summer; and she’s never alone. I try to spend as much time with her as I can afford