Page 76 of All We Thought We Knew

Nash was an artist.

I left the cottage, hoping he and Dad wouldn’t notice me hurrying away from it. I didn’t want Nash to feel as though I’d invaded his private space. When I returned to Mama, she was staring outthe window again. This time, however, she heard me enter the room.

Her eyes fell on the album in my lap when I retook my seat on the floor. “There are so many things I need to tell you, Mattie. Things that should have been revealed a long time ago.” She grimaced, as though in pain.

“Mama, do you need your medicine? We can talk later.”

She shook her head, becoming agitated. “I must tell you now. You need to know.”

“All right, Mama.” I reached for her hand. She clung to me the way a person clings to a life preserver when they’ve fallen out of the boat.

When she’d calmed, she looked at me with such intensity, I immediately knew I wouldn’t like what she was about to say.

“The letters were written to me. I’m Ava Delaney.”

I stared at her, trying to fit the puzzle pieces together in my mind, to no avail. “I don’t understand. The fellow who wrote them, Richard Delaney, signed themYour loving husband.”

She didn’t respond.

A shocking thought suddenly exploded in my head. I blurted it out before I’d had time to think it through. “Were you married to someone else before you married Dad?”

Her slow nod was in stark contrast to the thundering beat of my heart.

She indicated the album. “Open it.”

With shaky hands, I did as she bid. Images of a woman holding a baby met me. She looked like a younger version of Granny. A man I didn’t recognize stood with them, in front of what was unmistakably our farmhouse.

“Richard was Granny Gertrude’s only child. Her husband died when Richard was in high school, so he took over the farm.”

I looked up from the black-and-white photographs, my mind spinning. “This farm? But I thought Granny was Dad’s mother.”

She shook her head. “I don’t believe I ever lied to you and Mark, but I also never told you the truth about who Granny was to you.”

“She wasn’t my grandmother?” I asked, stunned.

“No, she wasn’t,” Mama said, regret in her eyes.

I thought back to the small, elderly woman Mark and I had secretly dubbed Grouchy Granny Gertrude. She’d never been affectionate to us the way most grandmothers were with their grandchildren, but she’d bake us cookies and let us look through her stacks ofLifemagazines on occasion. I hadn’t cried when she passed away, I recalled, although tenderhearted Mark had.

“I met Richard in Nashville when I was twenty years old,” she began, her eyes on the album. “He was handsome and full of life. He’d joined the Navy to see the world and wanted me to go with him.”

Dazed, I sat in silence as the shocking story spilled forth.

“He was sent to Hawaii shortly after we married. While I waited to join him, I came to live here on the farm, with his mother, Gertrude.”

I couldn’t believe what my ears took in. “What happened to him?”

She squeezed her eyes shut, either to block out the pain of the memory, or the pain from the disease ravaging her body. “He was killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

I gasped. “Oh, Mama.”

I looked back at the picture of Granny holding a baby boy. My mother’s first husband, I realized. Granny must’ve been devastated when she lost her son.

A thousand questions tumbled through my mind.

When had Mama met Dad? I couldn’t recall ever hearing the details of their courtship. I only knew they’d lived in the cottage when they first married, but after Mark and I were born, Granny moved out of the big house into the smaller dwelling.

“I was barely twenty-one years old, but I was a widow. My family, as you know, weren’t close, and I didn’t want to move to Chicago. I stayed here and helped Granny with the farm. I took a job at Camp Forrest, the military installation that was here during the war.”