I take one last look before giving up. At the very bottom, the dim light is bouncing off something bright. I reach in and take it out carefully. A Bible, the words stamped in gold across the white cover. It doesn’t look like the ones I’ve seen whenever I can be bothered to sidle into the back of a church service. This one’s bigger, nicer, a pattern bordering the cover, the edges of the pages all gilded and thick. I open it to the first page, the spine creaking. There, written in blue looping cursive, is a message.
If it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.
—For my daughter on her twelfth birthday. With all my love, your mother. 11/8/95
I’ve spent a long time looking for proof that there was somebody before Mom. That our family existed, somehow, in some form. This is the first of it I’ve seen. Somebody wrote this. My mother was a child once. And I knew that, of course I knew that, but not the way I do now.
“This,” I say. “How much for this?”
“You could check the tag,” Frank grumbles, but he comes over and reaches for the Bible. I don’t give it to him. Just turn the spine toward him so he can see. “That?” He raises his eyebrows, and I do my best to keep my own expression blank. “Weird choice.”
“You want to sell it or not?”
“I’m just saying, that’s all.” He props up the cover and frowns at the price scrawled on the top corner of the title page. “It’s forty.”
I should haggle, but I can’t stand to be here a minute longer. I fish the bills from my pocket—turns out two twenties is all I have—and slap them into his palm before heading back through the shop toward the door. The leather cover of the Bible is sticking to my chest and the sun is too bright. Mistake, I tell myself over and over. A mistake.
three
i can’t go home. What am I supposed to do—just wait until Mom gets there? It’s too much, and not enough, and I end up at Redman’s, in the back booth, a glass of water in front of me and no money to pay for anything. If it were any busier, they’d kick me out. But as it is, it’s just me and the waitress, and a guy slumped over at the counter who I’m mostly sure is still alive.
I watch a bead of condensation run down the side of the water glass to pool on the table. Now that I’m not faced with the spread of Mom’s stuff, the panic has started to wear off, but there’s still an uneasiness in my stomach, a sourness on my tongue that I can’t swallow, because I figured out why I’m doing this.
It takes a while, sometimes. To understand. It would mean something to me to have a gift from Mom, and so it’ll mean something to her to have a gift from hers. That’s what I told myself when I went to Frank’s. But Mom’s spent my whole life hiding us from her past, and this isn’t a gift. I’m punishing her. I’m trying to hurt her.
According to her, I try that a lot. Usually I don’t mean to, but this time I do, even if it took me a second to realize it. I’m going to show her that Bible and say, “Look what I found. I’ve been breaking your rules this whole time. You can’t keep me from my family forever.”
I open it again, trace the handwriting with my fingertip. Twelfth birthday. I can’t imagine Mom that young. Can’t imagine her reading a Bible, for that matter. Did her mother take her to church? Read her Scripture as she dressed for bed?
Her mother. I press the heels of my palms to my eyes and breathe deeply. My grandmother. This is my grandmother. My name and my blood—they came from her. She was real. And she still might be.
I just have to find her.
I turn a few more pages. Here and there in the margins I spot bits of handwriting. Underlined passages, and a game of tic-tac-toe scrawled across one of the headings.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress asks me. I jump, shut the Bible too hard on my fingers.
“No thanks,” I say. She stares pointedly at the empty spot in front of me where a plate of food should be. I put on a smile. “Maybe some more water.”
She picks up my full glass and then sets it back down. “There you go.”
As soon as she’s gone I flip the Bible back open. Something inside’s been nudged just out of place, poking out like a bookmark. Carefully, I turn to the spot where it was placed deep in the press of the pages, near the back of the book.
A photograph. Its edges are crisp, but the glossy surface is dotted with fingerprints, as though someone has spent a long time tracing the features captured in the picture. I bend closer. It’s of a house, or part of one, white paint fresh and proud against the sky, and the sun is bright enough that it’s nearly washing out everything else. The wide roll of the fields covered in snow, the blur of trees on the horizon. Everything except the girl in the foreground. She’s young, her face still round and full, unscarred and smooth, her arm outstretched toward the person behind the camera, and she’s smiling so wide I can see a gap where one of her front teeth has fallen out.
Mom, I think. It looks like her. Like me, when I was that age. This must be where she grew up.
Gently, I tug the photo free of the pages. I’m not telling her about it. The Bible she can have. This I’m keeping for myself. She was like me once, but I won’t be like her.
I flip the picture over, ready to fold it up and tuck it into my pocket. There’s handwriting here too. The script matches the dedication on the front page of the Bible. It must have been written by the same person. By my grandmother.
Fairhaven, 1989, Nielsen Farm. Followed by: Remember how it was? I’ll be waiting. Come when you can.
After it, luckier than I ever have been before—a phone number.
I’m smiling, a laugh nearly tipping out of me, before I can help it. All those days looking and looking, and it was right here. Someone calling me home.
* * *
—
Calhoun only has one pay phone, smack in the middle of town. I’d rather use my own phone, an old one with no touch screen and no caller ID, but we use pay as you go and my card ran out early this month after I spent a whole afternoon playing a game at the library and forgot to join the Wi-Fi network. So it’s the phone booth outside the center of commerce, and it’s right now, while Mom’s still at work and the streets are empty. With any luck, nobody will see me, and I’ll be able to keep this hidden from Mom a little while longer.
The booth is empty when I get there, like it always is, so I sidle in, drop the Bible onto the plastic shelf under the phone, and slide the photograph from my pocket, unfolding it carefully. The phone number is still on the back. I didn’t imagine it.
Can it really be as simple as this? A photo in a book, a quarter I stole from the tip jar in the diner and my family on the other end of the line?