"Lemuel," said Dad, from the kitchen doorway. We both looked at him. He shrugged. "My granddaddy used to coon hunt with an old Lemuel Wagers from up around Pine Gap. If she was a Wagers, that's her daddy's name, I'd bet you a dollar. Girls named those babies after their daddies half the time. Ivy told me that."
Carla wrote it in the uncertain column, with a question mark, and a note: Possibly Lemuel. Check Pine Gap / Clay Co. She didn't put it in the main column. She was strict about that.
Around four, while the light was still good, Dad sat down at the end of the table with his phone and Delphine Ott's letter and dialed the number at the bottom. He put it on speaker. He'd asked first, both of us. It rang twice.
"This is Delphine," said a woman's voice, older than I'd imagined, with a Louisville accent and something clattering in the background, pans maybe.
"Ms. Ott," said Dad. "My name is Wade Pruitt. I'm Ivy Calloway's son-in-law. You wrote to her in March, and I'm calling seven months late, and I'm very sorry about that. It's my fault." He looked across the quilt at me. "I believe I have the thing she wanted to show Margaret."
The clattering stopped.
"Oh," said Delphine Ott. "Oh, my Lord. Hold on. Hold on just one minute, Mr. Pruitt, I need to sit down."
* * *
Margaret Ellison came to Harlow Fork on Sunday afternoon, in the passenger seat of Delphine Ott's green Subaru, with a casserole dish on her lap that she'd made at six that morning because, she said, she didn't know what else to do with her hands.
Delphine was short and round and seventy-one, with white hair cut in a bob and a tote bag that said SEARCH ANGELS OF KENTUCKY – EVERYBODY CAME FROM SOMEBODY. Margaret was tall. That was the first thing I saw when she got out of the car, before anything else. She was tall and a little stooped, the way tall women of that age sometimes are, and she had on a navy cardigan and slacks and sensible shoes, and she stood in our driveway beside the boxes waiting to go to Lexington and looked at the house as if it might not let her in. Then she came up the walk, and Carla went down to meet her, and she shifted the casserole to one arm to shake Carla's hand, and I saw her hands.
They were big hands. Big-knuckled, chapped across the backs, the nails cut short and square. I had held a pair of hands exactly like them under the tent on Mulberry Street at a wedding three years before. I had to go back inside for a minute. Dad found me in the hallway and didn't say anything, just stood there with me, and then we went out together.