Page 13

I stared at the numbers on the phone’s dial pad, where Gran’s fingers had pushed the buttons so many times that they were shiny and smooth. “It’s a marriage license, actually.”

“For whom?” I could hear her plucking a pencil from the old decorated soup can on her desk.

I clenched my teeth, changing my mind twice before I forced myself to say it.

“Last name Rutherford. First name…Nathaniel.”

She fell quiet.

“Would have been sometime around 1911,” I added, filling the awkward silence.

“Why on earth would you need that?” She laughed, but it was taut.

I smiled, even though she couldn’t see it, hoping it would somehow bleed into my voice. “Just doing some historical research.”

“All right.” The wheels of her chair squeaked before I heard her nails on the keyboard. “Easy enough, I guess.”

I could imagine her there behind the high counter, chin tipped up so she could read the computer screen through the bifocal area of her glasses.

“Now, let’s see here.” Her voice trailed off as she kept typing. “Got it. What exactly are you looking for?”

“The name of the woman he married.”

The murmur of her reading under her breath was barely audible over the phone, and the damaged cord crackled again, making me wince. She made a sound that was followed by another silence.

“Sorry, Ida. I didn’t hear you.”

“I just—well, this is odd, isn’t it?” Another nervous laugh escaped her.

“What is?”

“It says right here…” She began to read. “ ‘Having applied for a license for the marriage of Nathaniel Rutherford, of Jasper’ ”—she took a breath—“ ‘age twenty-five years, to resident of Jasper—’ ”

The phone cut out again and I pinched my fingers to the cord, holding it in place.

“To Susanna. It says Susanna Farrow.”

My fingers slipped from the cord, finding the locket around my neck. I was sure the moment it left her mouth that I’d heard her wrong. That the voice in my mind whispering my mother’s name was just too loud. It was drowning everything else out.

“I’m—I’m sorry?” I stammered.

“That’s what it says, honey. I’m lookin’ at it right now.” She continued, “ ‘…united in matrimony Nathaniel Rutherford and Susanna Farrow the parties likened above, on the ninth day of September 1911 at First Presbyterian Church in Jasper.’ ”

I stared at the wall, a numb sensation bleeding through me.

“I didn’t know you all were related to that family.”

“We aren’t,” I said, the words made of air.

“Well, this woman was a Farrow. Doubt that’s a coincidence in a town this small. Your own mother must have been named after her.”

I blinked, fitting her words to the fragments of thought that were struggling to come together. Of course. That would explain it. Maybe someone up the line in the familyhadmarried Nathaniel Rutherford. But I didn’t remember Gran ever talking about another Susanna Farrow, and there was no gravestone in the cemetery for one. She’d always been so serious about making sure I knew the family’s history.

Except for when it came to Susanna, I realized.

I swallowed. “Can you find her birth record? Something that has her parents’ names or…?”

“Let’s see.” Ida typed away for a few long seconds before she clicked her tongue. “I don’t see anything for that name. The only one pulling up for a Susanna Farrow is for your mother back in 1966. But you already have all that.”