Chapter 11: Grandmother's Letter

I drove back to the Brask pack the next day in a Command truck, with Teague at the wheel.

Hollis wanted to come.

I told him no.

"If you walk into that garage, my father calls it an invasion," I said. "I'll go with Teague, and I'll be quick."

"I don't like it."

"I know." I put my hand flat on his chest, and the mark under his sleeve warmed against my fingers. "I'll be back by dark."

He caught my wrist and kissed the inside of it, once, hard, and let me go.

Teague drove for an hour with a very carefully straight face.

"Not one word," I said.

"I would never."

The garage looked smaller than I remembered.

The old mechanic who had run it since before I was born stood in the bay door in a stained apron, wiping his hands.

He had taught me how to rebuild a carburetor when I was nine.

He didn't say hello.

He looked behind me at the Royal truck and the crest on its door, and he looked at me.

"Come inside," he said. "Quick."

He shut the bay door behind us and pulled the chain on the light.

Then he went to the back of the shop and lifted the lid off a rusted engine block I had walked past every day for four years.

Inside it, wrapped in an oilcloth, was an envelope.

It was yellowed and soft, and the front said Linnea in a hand I knew from a hundred birthday cards.

"Your grandmother gave me this the week before she died," he said. "She said to hand it to the grandchild who stopped drinking the tonic."

"She knew about the tonic?"

"Open it."

I tore it carefully along the fold, and I read it standing under the bare bulb.

My dear girl, it began.

If you are reading this, you have stopped taking what your mother gives you, and I am proud of you.

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