"In your wallet." She said it without shame; she was seven. "When you paid for gas in Grand Island and left your wallet on the seat. There's a picture behind the other picture. Behind the one of Grandma. A girl with a clarinet, and on the back it says *Ellen, 1966*. Is that my aunt? Daddy said I had an aunt once. He said she went away."
*Once.* As if an aunt were a thing you could have and then not, like a cold, or a farm.
Walt took out his wallet. He did it slowly. He slid out the photograph of Marian — Marian at the State Fair in 1975, laughing with a corn dog — and behind it, where it had been for eighteen years, was the other one, the school picture, black-and-white, worn soft at the corners. A girl of sixteen holding a clarinet against her chest like a bouquet, her hair in a flip, her chin lifted. Gray eyes. Even in black-and-white you could tell they were gray.
"That's your Aunt Ellen," he said.
"Where did she go?"
He did not answer for a long time. Josie waited. She was good at waiting; it was one of the things her teacher had not put on the report card, and should have.
"I sent her away," he said finally. "When she was seventeen. She was going to have a baby, and I was ashamed, and I sent her to a place in Omaha where they took the babies and gave them to other people. And when she came home, I never once asked her how she was. Not once. I acted like she'd been to visit an aunt in Denver. And in the spring she left a note on the kitchen table and took the bus to California, and she didn't come back."
Josie absorbed this. She looked at the photograph, and at her grandfather, and back.
"Did you write to her?"
"She wrote to me." He had never said this aloud. Not to Marian. Not to anyone. "Once. In 1969. A letter came with a Sacramento postmark, addressed to me, not to her mother. Just to me. And I didn't open it. I put it in the stove." He stopped. "I thought — I don't know what I thought. I thought if I read it I'd have to answer it, and I didn't know how. And then it was in the stove and there wasn't anything to answer."
"That was a bad thing," said Josie, not as a judgment but as a matter of record.
"Yes. It was."
"Did Grandma know?"
"Your grandma wrote to her for fourteen years," Walt said. "I found the letters after she died. In the cedar chest, under the quilts. Ellen's letters back. Dozens of them. Marian never told me. I don't blame her. I wouldn't have told me either."
"Did you read them?"