because the thing sitting on top of those folded clothes had my mother name on it, and under it, a name I had never once heard her say.
It was a manuscript. A real one, three hundred pages, typed on a machine, the paper gone amber at the edges and smelling like the attic. The title page said the book was by somebody called Frances Kell. My mother name was Frances. Kell was her own mother maiden name. My mother, who I had watched cook the same Sunday dinner for sixty years in the same little kitchen in Cullman, had written a novel and signed it with half a name so nobody would know it was her.
I sat down on that rafter and read the first page in the attic heat and did not come down for two hours.
It was good. Lord help me, it was good, about a farm girl in the Depression who wanted more than the county could give her, and it was my mother, all of it was my mother, the woman I thought I knew top to bottom and had never once met. Underneath the manuscript was a folder of letters. Rejections, most of them, the polite kind, going back to when I was a baby. And one, near the bottom, that was not a rejection. A small press in Nashville, saying yes, saying we would be proud to publish this.
Clipped to the yes was her own handwriting, in pencil, faded. Told them no. The children are small and Ray would not understand. Someday. Frances Kell.
Someday. She had held a yes in her hands, the thing she wanted most in this world, and she had folded it into a suitcase and climbed back down out of the attic and made supper, because back then a woman like my mother believed her wanting had to wait behind everybody else wanting. And someday never came. She just kept it up under the low slope of the roof where it would not trouble anybody.
My daddy has been gone twenty years, and I loved him, but I will be honest that I was angry at a dead man for a day or two. Then I let it go. He did not do it to her. The whole world did it to her, and she did some of it to herself, and none of that could be fixed by staying mad.
What could be done, I did. I took Frances Kell book to a woman who edits such things, and this spring, more than fifty years after a small press in Nashville said yes, my mother novel is going to be a real book with her real name on the cover. Frances. All of it.
I thought that attic was the last of her, that once it was cleared she was really gone. I had it exactly backward. She was up there the whole time, three hundred pages of her, waiting for somebody to finally say yes and mean it. So I did.