Snapshots of a Small-Town Life
Disclaimer: I do not own CSI. Also, Bridgewater and Greyston County are fictional locations and the original characters that inhabit them are also fictional. Any resemblance they may bear to actual places is purely coincidental.
Rating: K
Chapter 13"Here's us on a picnic," Sara said, showing her daughter the photo she had selected more or less at random to shift the conversation safely away from Grissom.
"Mmm. You know, I'm kinda hungry," Jenny responded.
Sara looked at the clock and almost did a double-take.
"I'm not surprised," she replied. "It's lunchtime already. What do you want?"
"I don't know. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich?"
"Okay, PB&J it is."
"Mom, could you really not cook when you married dad?"
"Yes, I really could not cook. And I didn't eat meat, either."
Jenny looked puzzled. "You didn't eat meat? Why not?"
"Well, we had to do this experiment once, back when I was a scientist," she explained. "Without going into detail, it involved a dead pig and it was really gross. For a long time after that, anytime I went to eat meat I'd just see that pig and feel sick. So I became a vegetarian."
"What made you stop? Dad?"
Sara grinned. "Yep. You know how your dad likes to make those huge cooked breakfasts?"
"Yeah?"
"Well, he was doing that one morning not long after we moved here, and I walked into the kitchen and the bacon smelled so good I just had to have some." She smiled at the memory. "He teased me about it for weeks afterwards."
Jenny giggled. "Yeah, dad's such a tease."
"That he is." Sara set a plate of the sandwiches she had been preparing in front of her daughter and sat down with one of her own.
"Mom, are there any pictures from back when you and dad were scientists?"
Sara thought about it. "Um, I don't think so. Not in this box anyway. There's an album in the living-room that has some though. The first one on the shelf. I think it's brown."
Jenny ran off to get it, taking a sandwich with her. Sara hoped she wouldn't get the album sticky: it was Nick's, not hers, although he would have said it was theirs.
Jenny returned, with the album somehow unscathed. Sara flipped through it until she found a group shot taken not long before Ecklie split up the night shift.
"There's Mr. Grayson," Jenny observed, pointing but mercifully not touching.
"Grissom," her mother corrected automatically. "Actually, he was a doctor, but a science doctor not a medical doctor."
"And there's Uncle Greg. Why is his hair blue?"
Sara shrugged. "Who knows. He was always doing crazy stuff to his hair."
"Is that how come he's bald now?"
The thought made her laugh. Of all the old team, Greg – now married with kids of his own – was the only one she and Nick still saw on at least an annual basis, although they wrote and emailed Catherine and Warrick as well. It was Catherine who had called to tell them that Grissom was dead. Sara supposed that it was a sign of just how badly her relationship with her former mentor had deteriorated over the years that her kids called Greg 'Uncle' but couldn't even remember Grissom's name let alone recognise him in a photo.
"Who are the other people?" Jenny wanted to know.
"That's Warrick Brown, and the lady is Catherine Willows. You remember her, don't you? She visited us a couple of years ago."
"Oh yeah. She looks so different in the photo. You all do."
Sara laughed again. "Well, we were all about twenty years younger back then."
The thought made her sober. Had it really been that long? It seemed like only yesterday that she and Nick had made the decision that had changed their lives.
"Mom?"
"Huh?"
"Can we look at some more pictures of us now?"
She smiled at her daughter, one of the fruits of that decision. "Sure we can honey."