Sophia Ann Callahan Mayer Johnston, July 1946: Mama gave me this journal to add my story to hers and my grandmother’s when Fred died and I went home for the first time since I left Oklahoma and moved to Texas. It didn’t take me long to figure out that he wasn’t the same man I dated once we were married. He was as controlling and mean to me as his father, Hermann, was to Fred’s mother. I hated living in this house with him and them, and the only bright spot in my life was my mother’s letters and getting to visit with Albert, the foreman, on my daily walk around the place. If Albert hadn’t been there to talk to me for all those years, I might have taken a whole bottle of my mother-in-law’s sleeping pills and simply gone to sleep forever. I thought things might change when his parents passed, but they only got worse. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without him, not even to church. He blamed me for us not having children, and then when I did get pregnant after years and years of marriage and was almost past childbearing age, he said the baby didn’t belong to him. Fred drank too much one evening and fell down the stairs. He died when I was three months pregnant. Albert declared his love for me, and we were married when my daughter was two years old, and he adopted Vera. He’d always called me Annie, not Sophia, and I liked that, so when Fred was gone, that was the name I adopted. I think it was more of an effort to draw the line between the horrible life I had with Fred and the wonderful life Albert and I started, rather than an effort on my part to be someone else. Someday I’ll pass this journal on down to Vera Ann, and she’ll understand why she lives in this house and why I didn’t want her to be a Mayer.

“I’m confused, Mama,” Holly said. “So Grandma Vera was really a Mayer, and that made her kind of kin to Granny Hayes?”

“Yes, it did,” Lily answered. “Shall we go on?”

Holly nodded. “I like that I’m kinda kin to Granny Hayes.”

“Me, too,” Lily agreed. “She was a wonderful woman.”

Lily flipped to the next page to read: