She put her big chapped hand flat on the block, very gently, palm down, the way you'd put your hand on the head of a sleeping child to see if they were warm, and kept it there. Nobody said anything. The light moved a little on the table. Delphine Ott, who had done this, she told me afterward, a hundred and twelve times, stood in the corner by the sideboard and cried without making a sound.
Later, after the casserole, which was chicken and rice and very good, I brought out the photograph of my mother that lived on my dresser, the one from the summer at the Red River Gorge, Mom on a rock in a ball cap squinting into the sun. Margaret held it a long time.
"She has my chin," she said finally, wonderingly, as if she'd never thought about having a chin before.
"She has your hands, too," said Dad. "Had. Ivy did. Now June does."
I looked down at mine. I'd never noticed. They were big, for a girl. Big knuckles. Chapped across the backs from the Dairy Queen sink.
Before they left, Carla gave Margaret a single sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve: a photograph of the center block in raking light, the transcription typed underneath, and a short paragraph Carla and I had written together the night before about the Bethany Home and the thirty girls, with no other names in it. Then she opened her laptop at the end of the table, to the sheet called REQUESTS, and typed the first line, and turned it so Margaret could see.
1. Margaret Ellison (b. 11-9-61). Via D. Ott, Louisville. Oct. 18, 2026. Block 3-3. Shared in person, Harlow Fork. Family notified: yes.
"It isn't a secret," Margaret said. "Mine. Not anymore. You can tell anybody you want about me. I'd like that, actually."
"We'll still write it down," said Carla. "That's how it doesn't get lost."
* * *
On Monday evening, Opal Hensley's Buick pulled into the driveway, still pulling left, and Opal got out of the driver's side, and out of the passenger side, slowly, with a cane, came Verna Tackett.
I knew Mrs. Tackett the way you know everyone in a town like Harlow Fork. She was eighty-two. She had been in the quilting circle at the Methodist church since before my mother was born. She had sat in the third pew at Grandma Ivy's funeral and wept with her whole body, and I had thought then that I didn't know my grandmother had so many friends. She came up our walk on her cane in a church coat though it wasn't Sunday, and stood in the living room, and would not sit down.