Then there was the sketch I’d made at nine years old, and the torn poem, but it was her handwritten letter I couldn’t finish. It was meant for another, and I could read only the opening heartrending words before I folded it and vowed to someday give it to the man for whom she wrote the words. Why else would she leave all this for me?

I sat up straight, stretching. I cursed—a thing I don’t usually do but that seemed absolutely appropriate for that moment.

“What?” Rusty’s voice entered the room, and I looked up to see him standing in the doorway, squinting into the morning light, still wearing his linen pajama bottoms and white T-shirt.

“Shit,” I repeated, tasting the word as if it were a foreign food or forbidden drug.

“What’s going on? Have you been up all night?”

I nodded. “On and off.”

He shook his head. “Have you lost your mind?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Okay, then. I’m showering and off to work. I’ll see you tonight?”

“Okay, then,” I said, repeating him and yet knowing he wouldn’t notice. For the first time in a long time, I was angry with him. No, worse than angry. I wanted to punch him or throw the journal at his face or toss his golf trophy through the sunroom window. He didn’t see this, and he left me alone again.

The anger ran out of me as quickly as it had arrived, and I was spent, empty as the vase on the side table that sometimes held flowers, but only sometimes.

I didn’t know what to do with these disharmonious emotions about my marriage and husband. There were, then, absolutely no words to define the mayhem of feelings, as if I had become the turmoil and fallen into a place where words and sentences didn’t exist, explanations hadn’t been invented, and only dread and anger survived. I wanted words to go with the emotion.

But as I’d been doing, I ignored the awful sensations and went on with the day. Twice that same afternoon, I picked up the phone to call Hutch and tell him that I had Mother’s story in my hands, that maybe together we could figure out her “one small summer” in Alabama. I tried to ignore the need to call him, but although I could decide what to do and not do, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I tried, but my heart and mind wandered—like mindless, disobedient children—into the past.

And the past is where I found my present.