The morning air in southern Illinois always smells like damp limestone and woodsmoke when October starts turning into November, catching the corners of the fields and turning the stubble gray under a thin frost. I had been at the basement tables of Grace Chapel since seven that morning, sorting through three decades of donated paperbacks, old cookbooks with grease-stained margins, and church directories missing their covers. Mrs. Gable, who has run the Wednesday ladies auxiliary since Dwight Eisenhower was in office, dropped off a fresh box of books just as the church bells finished ringing out nine times.
My knees were stiff from the folding chair, and my fingers were gray with the dry, powdery dust of old paper. I picked up a paperback romance with a torn spine, checked the pencil mark on the flyleaf where we penciled ten cents, and dropped it into the yellow plastic crate at my feet. That was when the woman stepped up to the table. She was carrying a cardboard box folded shut at the flaps, her knuckles red from the cold, wearing a wool coat the color of wet slate that looked like it had seen twenty winters. She didn’t say good morning. She just set the box down on the trestle table with a dull thud that made the stacks of Reader’s Digest slide an inch to the left. On top of the pile, right beneath the cardboard flap, sat a small, faded blue cloth reader with a stamped black silhouette of two children and a dog on the cover.
My breath caught in my throat, hard and sharp, like I had swallowed a dry pebble. I didn’t reach for it right away. I just stared at the coarse blue buckram binding, the frayed corner where the cloth had split to show the gray board underneath, and the faint, pale water stain near the spine that looked like the map of a country I used to live in. I reached out a finger, my skin dry against the woven threads, and lifted the front cover. There, written in a child’s awkward, heavy-handed pencil, in the crooked, rounded letters I had labored over at seven years old, were the names I had not spoken aloud in decades: this book belongs to Neva and Fern Coyle. My sister and me. They had split us into different foster homes in the late fall of 1959, the year the state came with two Plymouth sedans and took us from the porch because the pantry was empty and Mama had stopped getting out of bed.
I was six. Fern was four. I never saw her again, not at the county fairs, not across the schoolyard in Trafalgar, not even in the old photographs that slowly faded into yellow ghosts inside my cedar chest. I looked up from the page, my eyes burning against the fluorescent hum of the basement lights, and looked straight at the woman standing on the other side of the trestle table. She had stopped moving her hands inside her pockets. She had short, untidy gray hair brushed back from a high forehead, the exact same slight dip at the bridge of her nose that I saw every time I looked in the bathroom mirror, and that funny little gap between her front teeth that Mama always said came from biting down too hard on peach stones. She didn’t look away when I met her eyes. Her chin gave a tiny, involuntary twitch, the same tremor our father used to get when he was trying not to lose his temper at a broken plowshare.
I said, “Where did you get this book?” My voice came out thin and raspy, like dry leaves being dragged across a concrete floor. She swallowed hard, her throat working beneath the collar of her wool coat, and her eyes dropped to the open book and then back to my face with a look of desperate, terrified confusion. She said, “It was my sister’s. I’ve been looking for her since…”
The silence in the church basement felt heavy, pressing down against my ears until the hum of the old furnace in the corner sounded like wind blowing through an empty silo. Nobody else was down the aisle just then; Mrs. Gable was upstairs in the kitchen rattling tin coffee urns, and the distant clatter of spoons was the only other sound in the world. I didn’t move my hand off the cover of the book. The pencil lead in those names had been pressed so hard into the cheap paper that the wood grain of the table showed through the page in ridges and valleys beneath my palm. I looked at her coat again, at the salt stains around the hem where she must have walked through the slush outside, and I realized her boots were scuffed the exact same way mine were, the left heel worn down faster than the right from a hitch in our stride.
She reached out with one finger, trembling slightly, and touched the blue cloth near the spine, right where the corner was frayed. She said, “My name is Claire. Claire Miller.” Her voice had a low, gravelly timbre that didn’t sound like mine, but the cadence was there, the slight pause before the second syllable, the way we both clipped our t’s like our grandfather from up around Peoria used to do. I shook my head slowly, feeling the dry skin of my neck pull tight. I said, “Claire wasn’t the name on the front of this book. My sister was Fern. Fern Coyle. We had the same red cowlicks that wouldn’t lie flat no matter how much spit Mama put on her hand.” The woman named Claire let out a short, ragged breath that sounded almost like a laugh, though there was nothing funny in it, just the sound of someone letting go of a heavy weight after carrying it up a very long hill.
She pulled her hands out of her pockets and reached into the deep leather satchel slung across her shoulder, her fingers fumbling with a brass zipper that stuck twice before giving way. She didn’t say anything for three long seconds, just dug around among crumpled grocery receipts and a leather key case until her fingers closed around something flat and stiff inside a plastic sleeve. She laid it down on the table right beside the blue reader, sliding it across the scarred green paint with a soft hiss. It was an old photograph, printed on heavy stock with scalloped edges that were turning brown and soft at the corners. It showed two little girls sitting on a sagging porch step with peeling white paint, the younger one holding a headless rag doll by its arm while the older one, me, with my hair hacked short by kitchen shears, had her arm slung protectively around the smaller child’s shoulder.
I knew that porch. I knew the knot in the floorboard under my left shoe. I had the exact twin of that picture tucked inside the back cover of my family Bible at home, wrapped in a piece of greaseproof paper to keep the moisture from eating away the emulsion. I looked from the photograph to her face, then back down to the small, familiar gap between her teeth, and the years between 1959 and today seemed to fold up like an accordion, leaving nothing in the middle except for the dust motes dancing in the shaft of window light. I whispered, “You kept it in your coat pocket all this time, didn’t you?” She nodded once, her eyes shining with water that didn’t spill over. She said, “I kept it in the tin box with my adoption papers, and then when the house in Muncie had to be cleared out after Mama passed, I put it in my purse.
I’ve carried it to fifty church sales in four counties, Neva. Every time I came through this part of the state, I dropped a box off. I always hoped someone would notice the writing on the flyleaf.”
The morning dragged on without us noticing the time, the church clock overhead chiming ten and then eleven while we stood on opposite sides of that folding table with the boxes of paperbacks between us. Mrs. Gable came down the stairs at one point carrying a tray of stale sugar cookies on a paper plate, took one look at our faces, and set the tray down on the card table near the stairs without saying a word, her church-lady radar telling her very clearly that something heavy was happening that didn’t involve the rummage sale pricing. She turned around and went back upstairs, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking softly against the linoleum landing until the door clicked shut. I looked down at the old *Dick and Jane* reader again, my thumb tracing the worn edge of the cover where the blue dye had rubbed off onto my skin, leaving a faint gray-blue smudge.
I looked up at Claire, seeing the sixty-seven years of other people’s lives written into the lines around her eyes and the slight stoop in her left shoulder, and I felt a strange, hollow ache in my chest that wasn’t grief and wasn’t joy, just the weight of all the empty Thanksgivings we had both sat through without knowing the other one was sitting down at a table just fifty miles away. I said, “They told me you went to a family up near Fort Wayne. They told me they changed your name so you wouldn’t look back.” She let out a dry, cracked sound that was half a sob and half a scoff. She said, “They called me Claire because they wanted a clean slate. They were good people, Neva, they really were, but they didn’t want ghosts in the house. Whenever I asked about before, about Trafalgar, about Mama coughing in the back room, they just changed the subject to church picnics or piano lessons.
By the time I was twelve, I thought maybe I’d dreamed you all up. Like you were just a story I made out of the wallpaper pattern.” I reached across the table, knocking over a stack of old paperback Westerns that hit the floor with a dull slap, and grabbed her hand. Her fingers were cold, rough around the knuckles from gardening or housework, and they gripped mine back with a fierce, desperate strength that made my bones ache. I said, “You didn’t dream me. I was right here in the county the whole time. I married a boy from the limestone quarry, lived forty years out on Route 4, and never once left the valley because I was scared if I moved away, you wouldn’t know where to look when you came back.” She stared at me, her mouth parting slightly, and then she let out a long, shuddering breath that shook her entire frame.
She said, “Forty miles. I lived forty miles north in Danville for twenty years and drove past the turnoff for this town every time I went to see my husband’s people.” We stood there holding hands across the rummage table for I don’t know how long, neither of us willing to let go first in case the other one turned out to be something we’d imagined while staring at old books too long.
Mrs. Gable came back down around noon with two paper cups of lukewarm coffee from the fellowship hall percolator, setting them down on the edge of the table without interrupting us. I picked mine up with my left hand, keeping my right hand firmly locked around Claire’s fingers as if letting go would make her turn back into smoke and dust. I looked at the boxes of books, then over at my coat hanging on the metal hook by the basement door, and I knew the rummage sale could get along just fine without me for the rest of the day. I looked across at my sister, at the strange, familiar tilt of her chin, and said, “We’re going to my house. It’s just three blocks up past the grain elevator, and I’ve got a pot of bean soup on the stove that’s been simmering since seven.” Claire gave a watery smile, the gap in her teeth showing clear and bright against her lips, and she reached out with her free hand to snap the cardboard box shut.
She said, “Only if I get to help you carry that box of books, Neva. We’ve got a lot of pages to catch up on.” We walked out of the church basement together into the sharp November sunlight, our boots crunching against the dry leaves on the sidewalk, neither of us letting go of the other’s hand as we turned the corner toward Elm Street.
The walk up the hill was quiet, the wind off the river carrying the smell of wet earth and distant coal smoke from the power plant down by the bend. We didn’t talk much on the way, just matched our steps to each other, our shoulders brushing every few feet like we were still two little girls trying to keep warm under one woolen coat while the state car bumped along the gravel roads. When we reached my front porch, the gray paint was peeling around the risers just like it had every year since Arthur passed, but the pot of mums by the screen door was still holding its color against the frost. I unlocked the heavy oak door, pushing it open to let out the familiar smell of floor wax, old newspapers, and onion soup that had been my whole world for thirty years. Claire stepped inside the hallway, her boots leaving a small crescent of dry mud on the braided rug, and she stood there for a moment with her eyes closed, breathing it in.
She said, “It smells like the house on Maple Street. Before everything happened.” I didn’t say anything to that, just took her coat and hung it on the peg beside mine, the two heavy wool garments hanging side by side like they belonged there. We walked back to the kitchen where the yellow linoleum caught the pale afternoon sun coming through the window above the sink. I didn’t turn on the overhead light; the natural gray light from outside was enough to see by, casting long shadows across the white oilcloth table. Claire pulled the blue cloth *Dick and Jane* reader out from her satchel and laid it flat in the very center of the table, right where the light hit the worn buckram binding. We sat down across from each other on the old wooden chairs with the spindle backs, but after a second, Claire stood up, walked around the table, and sat down right in the chair next to mine so our shoulders were touching.
She opened the back endpaper of the book, lifting the stiff cardboard cover where the yellowed glue was beginning to flake away from the spine. There, written in the neat, professional cursive of a county social worker from November 1959, was the case number, the intake date, and the names of the two different foster families in two different counties who had been paid five dollars a week to take us in. Claire ran her index finger along the ink line, her hand steady now, and then she turned to look at me with a look of quiet, hard-won peace settled deep around her eyes. She said, “They tried to keep us apart, Neva. They did a thorough job of it.” I put my hand over hers on top of the old book, our fingers locking together over the penciled names we had left behind when we were six and four years old.
I said, “They tried, but they missed one thing.” She looked down at the book, then back at me, a small, knowing smile touching the corners of her mouth. She said, “What’s that?” I squeezed her hand until the knuckles showed white, looking out the kitchen window toward the field where the frost was finally beginning to melt under the midday sun. I said, “They forgot we knew how to read.” We sat there together in the quiet kitchen as the afternoon shadows lengthened across the floor, neither of us moving, neither of us speaking, just two old women holding onto a blue book and thirty yards of shared blood while the rest of the world went on about its business.
