I leaned closer to the page.
Rosella kept her finger beneath the line, giving me time to read it for myself.
There was my name.
Elnora Ruthanne Whitsett.
I read it once, then again, moving my eyes slowly across each word.
My name had appeared on plenty of papers over the years.
Paychecks.
Medical forms.
Tax documents.
But I had never seen it written in a book like this, among the official records of the county.
I looked up at Rosella.
"What am I looking at?"
She pulled a chair away from the table and asked me to sit.
I lowered myself into it, keeping my purse on my lap.
Rosella sat across from me.
"This is a record concerning the Lockridge property," she said.
I felt my stomach tighten.
The farmhouse.
The driveway.
The little white house where my mother had lived before me.
I had spent years thinking of those places as part of my past, but I had never considered that they might have anything to do with me now.
I looked down at the page again.
The handwriting and printed details seemed to run together.
I could make out my name, but I didn't understand why it was there.
"Has somebody done something wrong?" I asked.
Rosella shook her head.
"Not that I can tell you from what you're asking. I wanted you to see this record because Henrietta specifically asked me to contact you."
I swallowed.
Mrs. Lockridge had been dead for more than a week.
I had already attended her funeral.
I had already watched her eldest son close a door in my face.
I had already accepted the three hundred dollars he had offered as though the years behind it meant nothing.
Now I was sitting in the courthouse, looking at my own name in a book that concerned her property.
I couldn't make those things fit together.
"Why would Henrietta want you to find me?"
Rosella looked at the page.
"She didn't leave me with every answer, Elnora. She asked me to make sure you came here and saw what had been recorded."
That answer unsettled me more than I expected.
I had hoped she would tell me something simple.
Perhaps Mrs. Lockridge had wanted to settle an old account.
Perhaps there was a document I needed to sign.
Perhaps my name had been written down by mistake.
Any of those explanations would have given me something familiar to hold on to.
Instead, Rosella was telling me that Mrs. Lockridge had made arrangements before her death.
And she had made a point of using my full name.
I thought of that Friday morning when she had written it on a napkin.
I could almost see her hand moving across the paper.
At the time, I had believed she was simply trying to spell it correctly.
Now I wondered whether she had been preparing for something she knew I would never expect.
"Did she tell you what this meant?" I asked.
Rosella took off her glasses and wiped them with a small cloth.
"She told me it mattered that you were contacted personally. She didn't want the message passed along through somebody else."
I looked at her.
"Not even her sons?"
Rosella paused.
"I can't speak for everything Henrietta intended. But she wanted me to speak with you myself."
I felt a chill along my arms.
For years, I had tried to stay out of the Lockridge family's private affairs.
I knew who the sons were.
I knew how they behaved.
But I had never asked about their mother's money or what she intended to do with her belongings.
That wasn't my business.
I was the woman who cleaned the kitchen.
I was the woman who washed the floors and drank coffee at the table on Fridays.
I had no reason to imagine that a deed book might ever hold something important to me.
Yet there I sat.
My name was right in front of me.
Rosella turned the book a little farther in my direction.
"Take your time," she said.
I tried to read the surrounding information.
There were details about the property, dates, and other names.
I couldn't tell what was important and what wasn't.
The longer I stared, the more nervous I became.
I had spent most of my life being careful about official documents.
If I didn't understand a paper, I didn't sign it.
If someone asked me to agree to something, I wanted to know what I was agreeing to.
That habit had served me well.
But this time, I wasn't being asked to sign anything.
I was being asked to look.
I placed my purse on the floor beside my chair.
Then I pointed to my name.
"Rosella, I don't understand how I came to be written here."
She folded her hands on the table.
"That's why I wanted you to come in. You deserve to know what the record says."
The word deserve stayed with me.
I wasn't used to hearing it applied to myself.
I had always thought of fairness as something you hoped for, not something you could expect.
If people treated you decently, you were grateful.
If they didn't, you tried to get on with your life.
That was how I had handled Carlton.
I had taken his check and driven away.
I had not demanded an explanation.
I had not told him what twenty-six years of work meant to me.
I had gone home and tried to figure out how to survive without the income.
Now a woman I barely knew was telling me I deserved to understand a record connected to the woman I had served.
I looked at the page again.
The letters were still there.
My name had not changed.
My circumstances, however, might have.
I was afraid to ask what that could mean.
"Was Henrietta worried about me?" I said.
Rosella looked thoughtful.
"She was concerned about certain things. She noticed more than people sometimes realized."
I remembered Thurston's demand that I clean his house, too.
I remembered Mrs. Lockridge hearing him from the next room.
She hadn't argued with him.
She hadn't even spoken about it until the following Friday, when she asked me for my middle name.
Maybe she had been thinking about what he said.
Maybe she had been thinking about how her sons treated me.
I couldn't know.
I had never asked her.
Now I wished I had.
Rosella closed the door to the room behind us when somebody passed in the hallway.
Then she returned to her chair.
"Henrietta trusted me with this responsibility," she said. "I promised I would carry it out."
I nodded.
I believed her.
There was something steady in the way she spoke about her friend.
They had played bridge together every Tuesday for forty years.
That was a long friendship.
Long enough to know when a person was being serious.
Long enough to recognize when a request was not something to put off until later.
I thought about the way Rosella had called me.
She hadn't simply sent a letter.
She hadn't asked one of the sons to pass along a message.
She had telephoned and made sure I understood that she wanted me to come in person.
That alone told me Mrs. Lockridge had been deliberate.
I looked once more at the book.
"What happens now?"
Rosella didn't rush to answer.
She turned to the page and followed the line with her finger.
"First, I want you to understand what was recorded. Then you can decide what you want to do with that information."
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.
For the first time since the telephone rang, I felt that I had some say in what happened next.
I wasn't being asked to fight anybody.
I wasn't being told to accept anything.
I was being given the chance to understand.
That seemed like a small thing.
But after the week I had endured, it felt like more than I could have asked for.
Rosella moved the book closer.
I bent over it again.
My name sat among the official details, and the woman across from me waited while I tried to make sense of what Mrs. Lockridge had set in motion.
I had come to the courthouse expecting trouble.
I was beginning to suspect that Henrietta had called me there for another reason entirely.
Click here to continue reading: PART 6: Rosella Had Known Henrietta for Forty Years, Yet the Promise She Made Before the Funeral Had Something to Do With My Life
For Twenty-Six Years, I Thought I Knew My Place in That Family, Until Mrs. Lockridge Asked Me a Question I Couldn’t Understand
Part 5 of 24
