Part Eight: The Locker
She led me through the dining room. It was the middle of a weekday afternoon, the slow time between lunch and dinner, and only a few booths were occupied. Two truckers at the counter. An old couple in a corner booth sharing a slice of pie.
The old woman looked up as we passed and smiled at me, a little too long. Like she knew who I was.
Patricia led me through the swinging kitchen doors, past the grill and the fryers and the dish pit, to a small storage room at the back. Shelves of canned tomatoes and flour sacks and paper towels. A mop bucket in the corner. And against the far wall, a row of metal lockers, the kind you see in high school gyms, dented and painted beige.
One of them had a strip of masking tape across the top. Written on the tape, in purple Sharpie, in my daughter’s careful, slanted handwriting, was one word: LILY.
“She doesn’t keep a lock on it,” Patricia said. “Nobody here does. I found it open this morning when I was looking for the spare apron.” She hesitated. “I wasn’t snooping, Mrs. Porter. I swear. But I saw what was inside, and I sat down on that milk crate and cried for twenty minutes.”
She opened the locker.
There was Lily’s blue backpack. An extra T-shirt, folded. A hairbrush. And a stack of grocery receipts held together with a binder clip, from the Walmart in Mountain Grove and the IGA in Cabool and the Dollar General on Main Street.
There were several envelopes, white, neatly folded and labeled.
And there was a little notebook. A spiral notebook with a purple cover, the kind you buy at the drugstore for a dollar.
Patricia reached in and handed me the notebook.
Part Nine: The Notebook
I recognized the handwriting immediately. Lily’s handwriting is small and careful and leans to the right, the same way Sam’s did.
On the first page, she’d written a heading and underlined it twice.
Mom’s grocery money.
Underneath were dates and amounts, all from September and October.
Sept 14 — $35
Sept 21 — $48
Sept 28 — $62
Oct 5 — $41
Oct 12 — $55
I stared at the page.
“Mom’s grocery money,” I read out loud. “What does that mean?”
Patricia didn’t answer. She just nodded at the notebook.
I turned the page.
The next page had a different heading. Sundays.
Underneath, more dates and amounts. And beside them, names.
Oct 6 — Mrs. Bennett — milk, bread, eggs, soup — $22
Oct 13 — Mrs. Bennett — groceries + Mr. Bennett’s Ensure — $38
Oct 13 — Mr. Wilson — prescription pickup (copay) — $15
Oct 20 — Mrs. Bennett — groceries — $31
Oct 20 — Grandma Rose — groceries — $27
Oct 27 — Grandma Rose — groceries + furnace filter — $34
I stopped reading. I looked up at Patricia.
“Grandma Rose,” I whispered.
Patricia nodded slowly. “Rose Porter,” she said. “From over on Elm Street. She comes in every Tuesday for the senior special.”
“That’s Sam’s mother,” I said. My voice cracked. “That’s Lily’s grandmother. We haven’t spoken in four years.”
“I know,” Patricia said gently. “Lily told me.”
I sat down hard on the milk crate. The notebook trembled in my hands.
“What is all this?” I said. “Patricia, what is my daughter doing?”
Patricia pulled a folding chair over from the corner and sat down across from me.
