And I knew. I knew before he said it. I saw it, all at once, the way you see a whole room when somebody hits the switch: the white blocks between the blue stars, and in each one the feathered wreath that I had traced with my fingertip for seven years in the dark, round and round, the loops and the curls, and in the center of each wreath the little tangle of stitches I had always thought was just Grandma Ivy showing off.
"It's in the quilting," I said.
"White thread on white cloth," said Dad. "Fourteen stitches to the inch. You can't see it, not looking straight on. You have to hold it so the light comes across it sideways, low, like late afternoon. Then the stitches throw a shadow and you can read it. Thirty white blocks. Thirty girls." He pulled into the church lot and stopped the truck crooked across two spaces and turned off the engine, and for the first time he looked at me. "She told me in January. In the hospice bed, in the front room. She said, 'Wade, I'm going to give you something to carry, and I'm sorry about it.' She made me get the quilt down off your bed one Sunday and bring it out there, and she showed me with a flashlight. She was so weak by then she could barely hold it, and she held it. She showed me hers."
"Hers," I said.
"The middle block. Row three." He said it as if he were reading it off a work order, because I think that was the only way he could say it. "Ivy C. Girl. 11-9-61. Rose."
Carla made a sound. I didn't turn around.
"I've got a—" I didn't know how to finish. "Mom had a—"
"Your mama had a half-sister she never knew about. Somewhere. She'd be sixty-five this November." He rubbed the back of his neck. "And there's more, and it's the worst part, and it's on me, so you'd better hear it now. In December, before she got so bad, Ivy got a letter. From a woman in Louisville named Delphine Ott. She's what they call a search angel, she helps adopted people find their families, for free, on her own time. And she wrote that she was working for a woman who was born at the Bethany Home on November ninth, 1961. And she'd done one of those DNA tests, the woman had, and it matched her to some cousins of the Calloways in Jackson County, and she'd worked it out from there. She thought it might be Ivy. She asked, very politely, if Ivy would be willing to talk."
"Did she?" I said.
"She tried. She got Opal's daughter to help her write back, in January, said yes, she'd talk, said she had something to show her. And then she got worse, and then she died, and in March another letter came from Delphine to the house