Days - Better

Later, they would go back to the tiny apartment with its leaking faucet and its stack of unpaid bills. Later, Grace would forget again—this afternoon, this name, this love. But right now, with her mother’s head on her shoulder and the salt wind in her teeth, Lena understood something she had been too tired to see before.

Merrow sat on an estuary, where the river met the ocean, but the cannery blocked the view. All Lena had seen for two years was the back of a freezer truck and the cracked linoleum of the breakroom. Grace, before the forgetting, had been a marine biologist. She’d once swum with humpbacks off the coast of Newfoundland. Now she sometimes forgot how to use a fork. Better Days

Lena helped her mother out of her wheelchair—a loaner from the clinic—and they walked the last fifty feet to the edge of the bluff. Grace leaned on her, light as a sparrow. The ocean stretched before them, grey and vast and indifferent. But then, just at the horizon, a crack of light opened in the clouds—a single golden seam—and the water turned to hammered silver. Later, they would go back to the tiny

Grace smiled—a real smile, the kind that used to light up whole rooms. “Which one?” Merrow sat on an estuary, where the river

Grace stopped walking. Her faded eyes, which had been lost somewhere inside the fog of her illness, suddenly sharpened. She blinked.