Sharon placed the picture taken at that last Easter gathering at the graveyard on the desk.    All the Easter mornings they had sung up the sun from that graveyard, and the only record of any of them was this photograph of the last one. They all sat grinning and squinting into the morning sun, surrounded by modest stone markers. Aunt Kathy had laughed when she saw it. "Look at us, grinnin' like possums in the middle of all those gravestones. We look like we're celebrating the passing of a rich uncle!"

The next frame held a copy of a poorly restored lithograph of her great, great, maternal grandparents, Joseph and Verlina Dobbins Ross.   Straight mouthed, steely-eyed, grimly enduring the difficult business of life on a poor dirt farm in Eastern Kentucky, sustained by the promise of rest and reward in heaven. She hung that on the wall above the bed, along with a small portrait of her parents, taken before Sharon was born. The files she had stashed under the bed included a copy of her mother's obituary. Now, having removed herself from the people that were really her family, she wondered briefly but bitterly where her drunk of a father might be. He'd written to Big Bill about a year ago from Tulsa, wanting to borrow some money.

The last picture was a snapshot taken of Billy, Louie and herself when they were 9 and 10 years old, They were standing on a flat rock in the middle of Grizzly Creek, leaning into each other, proudly displaying a large glass jar filled with creek water, shiners and crawdads. She remembered how mad they were when Cassie made them pour it all back into the creek after the picture was taken. She held the little picture in both hands, studied it, searched their three faces, noticed the easy intimacy of their prepubescent bodies crowded together on that little space of rock.   She rewrapped it in newspaper and added it to the box of files.