Free Here Lies Linc by Delia Ray Page A

books blocking the smeared windows, you could hardly tell anymore. I had always thought about how nice the room would look if we cleared away the clutter and let the light shine through all those hidden panes of glass.
    I stopped swiveling long enough to study Lottie’s rubbing wall. The walls on either side of the door to her office werepapered, floor to ceiling, with charcoal impressions from tombstones all over the world—an imprint of a famous French poet’s grave, an English knight in full armor, an epitaph for a sea captain who had been lost somewhere in the Atlantic. A few of the rubbings on the wall were mine. I still remembered the first one Lottie had let me do on my own. We were at a little graveyard somewhere out in the country in Massachusetts, and even when my hand had locked up in a cramp, I wouldn’t quit rubbing—not until the name Thankfull Parsons and the year 1758 and a shadowy skull with wings had appeared underneath the side of my black crayon.
    I spun around to face Lottie again. “Thanks, Thankfull,” I said.
    She stopped what she was doing, thumbing through a heavy leather-bound book, and her face softened as she looked up at me. I
knew
she’d remember. We used to say that all the time after our cemetery trip to Massachusetts together, whenever one of us passed the salt or did something nice.
Thanks, Thankfull
.
    “Thanks for what?” Lottie asked.
    “For getting the vacuum cleaner fixed.”
    “It only took the repairman two minutes,” she confessed. “Turns out it was only a sock stuck in the hose.”
    I gulped back an incredulous laugh and wheeled myself closer. “I’m sorry about all that stuff I said yesterday.”
    “No,” Lottie said slowly. “You were right about a lot of it. I know I get lost in my work sometimes. And I forget what it’s like to be your age.” Her brow furrowed, and then a puzzled expression wandered across her face. “Wait a minute. I guess Ihave no idea what it’s like to be you. I wasn’t exactly the typical teenager, you know.”
    “No kidding!” I said with a laugh bubbling out of my throat. “What
were
you like, anyway?”
    “A bookworm mostly. Happiest when I had the old sofa on the second floor of the public library all to myself … with a stack of fresh books waiting at my feet.”
    I winced, thinking of Lottie spending all her weekends in the tiny library in New Hope, Wisconsin, coming home to her prim and proper parents. Every other year we went to visit Grandma Dee and Grandad at their quiet retirement village in Florida. I could never wait to escape the way they watched my every move at dinnertime in the dining hall, waiting to see whether I would pick vanilla pudding or chocolate cake for dessert, or their funny rules about no baseball caps indoors or no swimming in the pool until at least two hours after eating.
    “Weren’t you ever lonely?” I asked.
    “Not really. I guess I was used to being by myself.”
    With Lottie in such a talkative mood, I decided to push my luck. “It’s kinda funny. You didn’t have any brothers and sisters, and neither did Dad, and then you guys decided to have just one kid too.”
    Lottie smiled wistfully, and I held my breath waiting for her to answer. “We used to tease each other about that,” she said at last. “About being spoiled only children. We called ourselves the Onlies. And we always talked about wanting to have another child, but …” Her voice faded on the last word.
    I knew what she was thinking. Life didn’t go according to plan.
    “I’ve been wondering,” I said, rushing to change the subject. “Who were we named after? Dad and I?”
    Lottie gazed toward the rubbing wall. “The name Lincoln came from your dad’s uncle. And Raintree was a family name from way back on his mother’s side. When I asked Ellen about it once, she told me she had found the name Raintree recorded in her family’s old Bible, and she liked it well enough to pass it on to her son. I’ve always