I almost laughed a second time, because that couldn’t be right either. My mother had a lot of friends. She was that kind of woman, the kind who knew her mailman’s kids’ names. And I had never, not one single time in my entire life, heard her mention a Helen.
Neither had my father. Not once.
“Best friends,” I said, “don’t scratch each other’s faces out of photographs.”
“No,” Helen agreed. “Usually they don’t.”
I stood up, crossed to the wall, and pulled the photograph down before she could say anything to stop me. The frame was genuinely old, the cardboard backing soft and yellowed. But the scratches across Helen’s face—those weren’t old at all. They cut clean and pale and deep, right through to the white beneath the image.
I flipped the frame over.
On the backing board, in my mother’s handwriting, were five words.
