Jiminy liked that her grandmother kept the old almanacs around. She felt comforted to know that useless things were welcome here.

Not that Jiminy was comfortable in her uselessness. To the contrary, she longed for a purpose. She always had. Inspired at a young age by Nancy Drew and Jessica Fletcher, and later—nonfictionally—by Erin Brockovich, Jiminy had held vague ambitions of becoming a private eye or a feisty attorney. But these aspirations had taken a backseat to the day-to-day responsibilities of just getting by. Life with an unreliable mother had robbed her of the sense of security necessary for upward mobility. It had rendered her anxious and shortsighted.

When Jiminy was in college, her mother had married a wealthy retiree who delighted in her capriciousness and indulged her every whim. The two of them had taken off to travel the world, ostensibly liberating Jiminy to finally focus entirely on her own life. But the years of worry and insecurity had taken their toll, and instilled in her a reflexive skittishness that she seemed unable to shake.

It had taken all of her nerve just to move to Chicago to pursue law school, and she’d hoped this accomplishment signaled a new proactive boldness. But once there, Jiminy had continued to feel stunted and hesitant, which frustrated her. Her growing certainty that she was withholding some essential part of herself had filled her with quiet desperation. All of this had come into stark relief in the moments after she’d been taken out by the bike courier. As she’d lain there feeling for broken bones, Jiminy had been filled with revulsion for herself and her inability to fulfill the potential she surely possessed. Concerned that this disgust could harden into something crushing, she’d picked herself up, canceled her life as she knew it, and fled to the first place that popped into her mind. Had the bike courier been wearing a “Keep on Trucking” shirt, she might have ended up in San Francisco. As it was, she found herself in rural Mississippi. Exactly what she was to do now remained a mystery.

Through with the almanacs, Jiminy glanced toward the windowsill and remembered in a flash something she’d discovered about this room nineteen years before and hadn’t thought of since. She ran her hands along the wood paneling beneath the window and, sure enough, felt a square portion give a little beneath her fingers. She pressed harder and experienced the same thrill she had as a six-year-old as it sprang open to reveal a secret compartment.

Peering into it, Jiminy found a translucent snail shell perched atop a book. She picked up the book and carefully dusted it off. The black leather cover was painfully cracked. It claimed to be The Holy Bible, but the inside pages were homemade and filled with firm, slanted handwriting that Jiminy assumed did not belong to God. The inscription on the first page confirmed this.

Henry Esau Hunt—Recollections and Resolutions

Her grandfather’s name, her grandfather’s writing. Her grandfather’s diary? Jiminy thumbed through the roughly bound pages. The handwriting was very precise, but faded and difficult to read. The first entry was dated January 1, 1954, and titled “Our Wedding Day.”

It contained a brief description of the event, really just a record of the fact that Henry Esau Hunt had married Willa Calamity Peal in the presence of their parents and a minister at noon on that New Year’s Day. The entry seemed dispassionate enough, though Jiminy supposed it had meant enough to Henry to warrant beginning this book.

From that day forward, it appeared that Henry had made an entry every six months or so, only to record a happening deemed significant. As the years wore on, he began adding slightly to the entries—just bare-boned commentary that hinted at what he might have been feeling at the time. On January 6, 1959, Henry noted that Margaret Peal Hunt was born at eight thirty-five in the morning. Henry had written: “A long, hard night. A joyous day.” Jiminy smiled ruefully, reflecting that her mother continued to be known for such extremes.

She flipped to the last entry, which occurred about two-thirds of the way through the book, with plenty of blank pages left to be filled. It was dated January 1, 1967, and it read: “Hard year, hopeless. Poor Lyn, poor us.” And then, nothing more.

Jiminy knew that her grandfather had died suddenly and unexpectedly when her mother was eight years old. She was less certain that he’d been killed by a lost tribe of Indians hiding in the surrounding hills, or a roving band of land pirates, or a swarm of killer vampire bats up from the Louisiana swamps. All of these explanations had been offered to Jiminy by her mother, with considerable flourishes, but Jiminy had instead accepted a cousin’s report that her mother’s father had succumbed to a massive, sudden pulmonary embolism, and died very prematurely at the age of thirty-two, leaving his wife and daughter to fend for themselves as best they could.

Since Jiminy’s mother had been born in 1959, she would have turned eight years old in 1967, the year of Henry’s final entry. It seemed he’d died before he could make another one. Had the hardness and hopelessness he’d written about brought on the embolism? Was that just a medical term for an unfixable broken heart?

Poor Lyn, poor us. Jiminy assumed the Lyn he referred to was the Lyn she knew. The Lyn who had worked for her grandmother for over fifty years, and in whose indifferent disregard Jiminy had always found a special solace. The most anyone could hope for from Lyn was a gruff affection that could be easily mistaken for dislike. Still, Jiminy had always gravitated toward her, because as shy as Jiminy was, there was something about Lyn that drew her out. Now that she thought about it, Jiminy felt an intense gratitude for Lyn that she’d never adequately expressed. Why hadn’t she? She decided she would. That was something she could do.

Poor Lyn, poor us. What had happened to Lyn? What had happened to all of them?

Jiminy moved backwards through the pages, looking for answers. Her hand paused on an entry that read: “Edward and Jiminy found, buried. Awful.”

For a moment, she felt like she couldn’t breathe, like she’d stumbled across a hidden portal into the future and was illicitly reading about her own demise. She’d been found and buried, but how had she died? She shivered. The date of the entry was June 24, 1966. There had obviously been another Jiminy. She’d never in her entire life heard of her, not even in her mother’s crazier stories. Who was she?

“Scarin’ up the devil in here?”

Jiminy leapt up, slamming the book shut as she whirled around in surprise. Lyn was standing in the doorway, her shoulders stooped with age. She was taken aback by Jiminy’s sudden fright. It made her clutch her own heart in solidarity.

“Lord child, what’s wrong with you?”

“Sorry,” Jiminy replied, somewhat breathlessly.

She wondered if Lyn recognized the book clasped in her hands. Lyn was looking at her strangely.

“Your grandma just wanted to make sure you were still alive since we hadn’t heard a peep outta you all mornin’,” Lyn said flatly, before turning to leave.

Jiminy stared after her, stricken. She wanted to stop her. She had things to say. She had things to ask.

“Wait,” she said, but it came out a whisper that Lyn didn’t appear to hear.

“Wait,” Jiminy repeated. “Thank you.”

She’d meant to say this loudly, and meaningfully, but again the words barely escaped her throat, and they drifted ineffectually toward Lyn’s hunched, retreating back, too weak to possibly be heard.

Chapter 3