First of all, thank you so much for your very thoughtful reviews (but we'll get to that in detail when I move my butt and reply to them ]).

Second of all, I love this, and /you/ are the one with the story that deserves reviews. Although the passage of time seems a /little/ bit rushed to me, everything else about it was flawless; I'm especially fond of the beginning of this, and your parentheses were very effective-I tried that once and, in my humble opinion, failed miserably. There were lots of really excellent lines in this, too: "Emmeline’s mother is all cigarettes and pieces of broken beauty," "Emmeline’s mother is left in broken glory in a house that’s too big and a little girl that’s too young to understand that it’s not her fault her mother cries all the time," "She is young and daring and beautiful (in a careful, subdued way) and she wipes away her mother’s ghost with smiles and sunshine," etc., etc.

All in all, this was a touching, poignant read for me. Your characterizations are wonderful, and I'm nothing short of jealous of your prose. Nice work!