“Beautiful day for eighteen,” I said in the lingo I knew well. “What did you shoot?”

“An eighty-six. Not my best, but I had a par on fourteen. Yes, it was beautiful weather.” He walked into the closet. There was the clang of empty hangers, and then he returned to the bedroom, his eyebrows dipped low and protective, as if this could stop any tears or grief. “Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome.” I hugged him.

He returned the hug, but he was taut, as if he were responsible for holding his body together.

“Dad, I need to ask you a question.”

“Anything, Ladybug.”

“Do you know anything at all about Mother working with the civil rights movement?”

“She didn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“Ellie, we’ve been together since almost the beginning of that era, and … well, she cared, but she was never involved.”

“Well …”

He held up his hand to halt my words and then stepped back and stared at me, and then at the leather book. “You can take that with you.”

“I was planning on it,” I said.

He shook his head. “It’s like the world has turned upside down.”

“I know.” I kissed his cheek.

“Ellie?” He stared out the window.

“Yes?”

He gazed back at me now, tears filming his eyes. “What am I going to do about her garden?”

“I don’t know, Dad. God, I don’t know.”

Five

Five

I returned to my own home and held Mother’s journal in my hand. Everything else in my life would wait. Rusty was out that night, and I’d canceled my dinner with Sadie. I sat on the chaise longue in the sunroom and began to read. What she’d lived in seventy years I would read in one night, because this much I knew—I would not stop until I was done.

In the early entries, I’d discovered there were years when Mother didn’t care about where she lived, what she wore, whom she married, where she vacationed, or to what country club she belonged. She swung on the monkey bars, spent all night writing a story, and cursed. She cared about and loved her mother; she needed her mother’s love. There were moments and maybe even years when she cared about books and stories and laughter.

Then her entries moved into the years when she fell in love with this man who broke her heart. He was only called “Him,” his name never once mentioned.

I continued to read, my legs curled underneath me; the sun was gone, and the only light in the house was the reading lamp over my shoulder. I read about her childhood and her goals, about her heart and her family, and about “Him”—the man she never named, but the man she desired who eventually recanted and withdrew his love.