The Name on the Broadcast novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Photo

Annie's mother Frances meets Laney at a diner, recognizes the handwriting on the porch photo and takes her hand, then asks if Laney ever saw a grave.

The kettle on Frances Wooler's end of the line screamed and screamed.

She didn't turn it off.

"Say that again," she said.

"I think your daughter was my mother," I said. "I think she died when I was four."

"Where?"

"In the town I grew up in. It's three hours from here, up in the hills."

There was a long silence.

Then the kettle stopped, and I heard her breathing.

"I'm two hours away," she said. "I'll be there by seven. Don't you dare disappear on me."

"I won't."

"Give me a place."

The guy in the glasses leaned over and wrote on the log sheet. The all-night diner on the highway, across from the stadium lot.

I read it to her.

"I know it," she said. "I've taped flyers to its bathroom mirror for twenty years."

She hung up.

I put the receiver down very carefully.

"I'm Ben," the guy in the glasses said. "Sorrell. I run the station."

"Laney."

"I'm coming with you tonight."

"You don't have to."

"I've read her notice out loud four Octobers in a row," he said. "I'd like to meet the person who finally called."

I spent the day in my room with the blinds down.

I didn't go to my seminar.

I lay on my bed and looked at the photo until the colors stopped meaning anything.

At six-thirty Ben was waiting outside my dorm in a dented green hatchback.

"You look like you haven't eaten," he said.

"I haven't."

"Good. The pie at that diner is terrible, but the fries are honest."

Frances Wooler was already in a booth at the back.

She was small, with short silver hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain. A canvas tote sat beside her, stuffed with paper.

She stood up when she saw me.

She looked at my face for a long time.

"You're not her," she said.

"No, ma'am."

"I didn't think you would be. I just had to look."

She sat back down. Ben and I slid in across from her.

A waitress came by. Frances ordered coffee for all three of us without asking.

Then she folded her hands on the table.

"Go on," she said. "From the start. Don't make it nicer for me."

So I told her.

I told her about the town, and the church ladies, and my grandmother.

I told her about the porch and the road, and the word I screamed until my mother stopped.

My voice went flat and strange somewhere in the middle. I kept going anyway.

"A few weeks later my grandmother said she died of a fever," I said. "That's all I know. I swear that's all I know."

Frances didn't say anything.

Her coffee had gone cold in front of her.

Ben had stopped eating his fries.

I took the photo out of my phone case and slid it across the table.

Frances picked it up with two fingers.

She looked at the young woman on the porch.

Then at the little girl on her hip.

Then up at me.

She made a sound I'd never heard a person make. Small and low.

Then she turned it over.

"Annie and the bean," she read.

She ran her thumb over the letters.

"She always made her A's like that," Frances said. "Like little tents. Her third grade teacher wrote me a note about it."

"I'm so sorry," I said.

"For what?"

"I was the one who stopped her. If I hadn't grabbed her, she'd have reached the road. Somebody would have picked her up. She'd have come home."

Frances looked up at me over her glasses.

"How old were you?"

"Four."

"Four," she said. "Laney, when my son was four he tried to mail the cat to his grandmother."

Ben made a noise into his coffee that might have been a laugh.

Frances didn't smile, but something around her eyes eased.

"A four-year-old held her mother's legs," she said. "Grown people bought her. I know which ones I'm angry at."

She reached across the table.

She took my hand, the one that wasn't holding the cup, and held it hard.

Her fingers were cold and dry and very strong.

"What's the name of this town?"

I told her.

She took a pen out of the tote and wrote it on a napkin in big tent-shaped capitals.

"Twenty-six years," she said quietly. "We searched every bus station in four states. Her father drove every county road with a flashlight. And she was three hours away, having a baby."

"Yes," I said.

She looked at my face again, the way she had when I walked in.

Not for Annie this time.

For whatever of Annie was left in it.

"You've got her freckles," she said. "Right there. Across the nose."

Nobody had ever told me I looked like anybody.

The waitress came back with the coffee pot.

Frances waved her off without looking.

She was still holding my hand.

"You said she died of a fever."

"That's what they told me."

"Did they bury her at the church?"

"No."

"In a cemetery?"

I opened my mouth.

I closed it.

I thought about the little church graveyard behind the hall, with the Haskett stones in a neat row along the fence.

My grandfather. My great-grandparents. A baby brother of my father's who died at two weeks.

I had walked past that row every Sunday of my life.

Frances's grip tightened.

"Laney," she said. "You said she died. Did you ever once see a grave?"

I looked down at our hands on the sticky table.

"No," I said. "Never."

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