Dorothy Garlock - [Tucker Family] by Keep a Little Secret

long and straight, had been hastily piled
     on top of her long face in an obvious attempt to look more sophisticated. Her small mouth was bunched tightly, the woman uncomfortable
     at being the object of the photographer’s attention at best, angry at worst. Still, Charlotte knew that the picture she held
     was Sarah’s most prized possession.
    “She died when I weren’t waist-high,” Sarah said simply.
    “I’m sorry,” Charlotte replied.
    “It come on in the fall,” the girl explained. “Pa said she’d been out in the rain too much… that a wet had done settled into
     her chest and it weren’t comin’ out till it killed her. Weeks went by and there weren’t nothin’ to do but listen to coughin’
     comin’ from her bed.
    “Last time the doctor come to look in on her, he was real quiet, like he was in a church or somethin’. He listened to her
     breathe, put his hand on her wrist, gathered up his things, and made for the door. Just ’fore he left, he turned to Pa and
     said he was sorry. Pa just nodded. She died that night.
    “Since then, it’s just been me and Pa and…” But her voice trailed off before she could say more.
    In silent answer to Sarah’s sad tale, Charlotte retrieved the locket she always wore around her neck, opened the tiny clasp,
     took a familiar look at what it contained, and held it out to the pregnant girl. Curiously, Sarah took it.
    “This is my mother,” Charlotte explained.
    “She’s pretty.”
    “Yes, she was,” Charlotte agreed with a tiny smile. “But just like your mother, she was taken from me when I was very young,
     and just like you, about all I’ve got to remember her by is a photograph.”
    “You look an awful lot like her.”
    “My father has said that I’m the spitting image of her, especially the hair.”
    “What did she die from?” Sarah asked abruptly.
    Charlotte’s heart clenched tightly. She knew that there was no way she could tell Sarah the truth: that Alice Tucker had died
     in childbirth, leaving her newborn daughter behind to be raised without either of her parents. Thankfully, in Charlotte’s
     case there had been her aunt and grandmother to lovingly take over and raise her, an essential task that she doubted Alan
     Beck would be capable of performing. In Sarah’s fragile state, already feeling responsible for the predicament she and her
     father found themselves in, adding the fear of dying seemed unnecessarily cruel.
    “My mother… had a weak heart,” Charlotte managed.
    For a long moment, neither of them spoke, content to sit silently, each staring at the other’s photograph, the onlysound a dog’s distant bark. Charlotte was getting ready to speak, to again talk about furthering Sarah’s education so that
     she could provide for her unborn child, when the girl spoke, her voice trembling: “I’m a bit scared to be a mother.”
    “I think that any woman, no matter her age, would be a bit frightened.”
    “Would you be scared if you were me?”
    Charlotte nodded.
    “Thing is, I ain’t got no one around to tell me right from wrong with a baby. I ain’t never had no time with one ’fore, ’cept
     for this one time on a train. What happens if I do somethin’ wrong?”
    “You have your father…”
    “He ain’t no woman.”
    “No, he’s not,” Charlotte agreed, her concerns about Alan’s skills at child rearing already in question. “But…” She paused,
     the weight of what she was about to say heavy before plunging forward. “You have me.”
    “You’d… you’d help me?”
    “I’ll try, but only if you’ll let me teach you proper schooling.”
    “I’ll have to do learnin’… and you’ll be my teacher…”
    Charlotte began to smile a bit beside herself; that
was
what it meant. When she had first set foot in the Becks’ small cabin, she’d already resigned herself to exiting as quickly
     as possible. But, after beginning to understand Sarah’s predicament, she had been swayed. Now shewould take on