I didn’t turn loose of the bank slip until I was back in the kitchen. I moved the plastic flowers and laid it between us as I sat down.

Winking, I giggled. “I always did love dear Uncle Jefferson.”

“It’s real?” Nana whispered as if saying it too loud would make the possibility disappear.

“It’s real,” I answered. Part of me knew it was too good to be true, but I needed hope desperately.

Nana shook her head. “Money don’t just fall out of the sky. There must be a catch.”

Much as I hated to, I agreed with her. No one had ever given us anything. Somewhere, if we took this money, there would be the payback. I reread the lawyer’s letter while I ate. It looked cut-and-dry. A man named Jefferson Platt, who the lawyer thought was my uncle, had left me his property on Twisted Creek. Nowhere was there a small clause that said “This offer is only good for…”

Nana lifted the deposit slip. “What should we do, Allie?”

I thought of all the options. Ignore the letter. Stay here and look for another job. We could pack and try Kansas City again; I’d found a good job there last winter working in a shoe store. Or…

There was that corner again waiting just beyond my view. I knew what I had here. Minimum wage with winter coming on. A van in need of tires. Nothing left to sell for extra money. “We go to Texas.” I tried to sound positive one more time.

Nana grinned, turning her face into a river of wrinkles. “It’ll be good to be back home. I haven’t seen Texas since the summer I turned sixteen.”

I couldn’t resist smiling back. I’m not sure how she always managed to do it, but my nana could look on the bright side of a tornado. She had that sparkle in her eyes sometimes that seemed to say this life she lived and worked in was simply a stage; her real world, where her heart lay, was somewhere else. Good times or bad, both were simply acts in the same play to her.

I wanted to go to Texas to see if this inheritance was real, but I already knew deep down that it couldn’t be.

So, why go?

I straightened, a weary soldier answering bugle call. Because there are times in your life when any somewhere looks better than where you are, and this somewhere made my grandmother smile.

That night, while Nana watched Survivor, I paid off every bill I owed. Almost half the money was gone by the time I finished, but I would be leaving Memphis with my head up. I wrote the landlord a note and told him to keep the hundred-dollar deposit since I wasn’t able to give him any notice. He’d been kind, letting me pay a few weeks late once when Nana got sick and my entire check went for a doctor’s visit.

An hour later, from my bed on the couch, I listened to Nana’s snoring and tried not to get my hopes up. I knew it made no sense that some stranger would leave me something. There had to be a catch…a trapdoor I’d fall into any minute. I got up and called the bank, punched in my checking account number and password.

The money was there.

I tried to go back to sleep. What if the five thousand was all there was? What if the property was worthless and I made a twelve-hour drive to find out I had nothing waiting?

Moonlight from a rip in the curtain shone across the living area and onto the kitchen counter. A roach crawled along the beam of light, searching for crumbs.

I laughed. What did I have to lose? I was going to Texas. There would be jobs there as well.

By dawn I was packed. We ate breakfast with the deposit slip still between us. I left at eight and drove to the nursery to turn in my uniform. The boss smirked at me, but I only told him to have a nice day and waved. I heard once that you should always be nice to people you dislike; it confuses them.

When I got back to the house, Nana was ready. A box of kitchen staples and her tattered suitcase waited by the door.

My grandmother wasn’t a collector and told me many times that the only thing of value in her life was me. We had no pictures or keepsakes from her past or my childhood. All she ever moved besides essentials were her Bible and her wind chime.

Like hopeful fools we loaded our belongings once more and left the key in the mailbox. The same bored girl at the bank counted out my money. I debated asking for it in ones, but settled on twenties. I left twenty dollars over what I’d used to pay bills so the account could stay open.

The teller blinked a smile as she handed me almost three thousand dollars.

I smiled back and walked out of the bank with more money than I’d ever had in cash.

It felt good.

I felt rich.

And I started to believe that maybe I really did have an Uncle Jefferson.

Chapter 2

Twenty-four hours later, after driving all day and spending the night in a Motel 6, I was ready to meet the lawyer and inherit my property. I held my disposable coffee cup in one hand as I drove toward the offices of Garrison D. Walker, Attorney-at-Law.

“Maybe you knew Uncle Jefferson, Nana? Maybe he was a friend of your family from way back?” We’d played this game for a hundred miles with no luck.

Nana shook her head. She’d been a tenant farmer’s wife all her married life, and once my grandfather died she’d lived with me. She could count the number of people she’d called friend on her fingers. And as for Nana having a rich, secret lover hidden away somewhere, that was about as likely as magnolias in Alaska.

“I knew a Jeff once, but he went by the name of Red ’cause he had hair as red as an apple,” she mumbled around a donut. “He took me to a dance that summer I spent time in Texas. My mom sent me to stay with my brother Frank’s wife, who was expecting. She’d taken a summer house for one week when Dallas was burning up ’cause being big pregnant is hot on a body even in the winter. She drove up to Oklahoma and picked me up, then we wandered around the most nothing land until we found the place she’d rented.”

Nana smiled as the wind tickled through her short gray hair. “All the boys had been called up after Pearl Harbor. My mom wanted me to stay with Mary until school started. She weren’t but a year older than me.”

I remembered the story and didn’t want to hear the retelling of how Frank was killed in the war and his wife died in childbirth. “Tell me about this Red you met,” I encouraged.

Nana licked donut icing off her fingers. “He was real nice. We talked almost all night, every night that week. He was turning eighteen in the fall and couldn’t wait to join up.”

“Why didn’t you marry him?” I winked at her.

She laughed. “I was already engaged to your grandpa. My folks had promised we could marry as soon as I finished my eleventh year of school. They said your grandpa was solid on account of him being older than me and already a farmer.” She popped another donut and turned to look out her side window. “Some folks didn’t think so, but those men who stayed to farm did their part in the war, too.”

I frowned. If Nana didn’t have anyone in her past, it had to be me. But who?

I’d had my share of boyfriends in college, but most had wanted to borrow money from me, not keep in touch because they planned to name me in a will. Once I moved back home, I hadn’t known a single man in the county I wanted to have a cup of coffee with, much less get involved with romantically. When the few single guys my age did come around, they lost all interest as soon as they discovered Nana was part of the package.

Glancing at Nana, I smiled. She’d been a real help and didn’t even know it. A man who couldn’t love Nana, too, wasn’t worth having.

Nana refolded the map she’d been trying to get back in its original shape since Oklahoma City. She stuck it over the visor where I’d put the lawyer’s letter. Nana had read it aloud so many times during the trip, we could quote almost every line. She hummed as we passed through the streets of Lubbock.

This morning, we’d had our motel showers and hot coffee. It was time to meet with Garrison D. Walker and solve the mystery. I tried not to hope for anything. If the inheritance was nothing, we’d already had an adventure, and I could look for a job here as easy as I could have in Memphis.

I turned off of Avenue Q onto a tree-lined street named Broadway. Finding the lawyer had been no problem, thanks to the directions he’d left on the back of his letter. When I called to tell him we were coming, he sounded excited. Maybe he was glad to be rid of his responsibility with the will.

A very proper secretary welcomed us. She offered us a seat and disappeared through one of the mahogany doors behind her desk.

“Don’t say anything about not knowing Jefferson Platt,” I whispered to Nana, who was busy pulling the tag off the outfit I’d bought her at a Wal-Mart last night. I thought if I was going to inherit something we should look like we didn’t really need whatever it was. We’d found dresses for both of us for under a hundred dollars. Nana’s was navy, made to look like a suit with a white collar. Mine, a shift that buttoned down the front, was the pale blue of a summer day. Like everything I bought, it seemed a few inches too long, but we hadn’t had time to hem it.

“I won’t say a word,” Nana mumbled. “It’s not right to talk about the dead, dear.” She’d managed to pull the tag off, but the plastic string still dangled from her sleeve.

I think the world of my nana, but she is a woman far more comfortable in a housecoat than a suit. “All dressed up” to her meant taking off her apron. She helped me through those first two years of college by cooking at the elementary school a mile down from the farm my grandfather worked. She’d walked the distance every morning and cooked, then returned home to the full day’s work of a farmer’s wife without one word of complaint.