I covered her hand with mine, wishing for the millionth time that I could make things better for her. When you’ve only got one person who loves you, you have to wish extra hard.

“Miss Allison Daniels?” a man of about fifty asked as he neared.

I stood and shook his hand. “My friends call me Allie,” I said. “And this is my grandmother, Edna Daniels.”

“Garrison D. Walker, at your service.”

The lawyer smiled and waited for her to offer her hand. But Nana wasn’t about to let him see her plastic string, and he was too much a Southern gentlemen to offer his hand first to a lady.

Walker turned back to me. “We’ve had a hell of a time finding you, Miss Daniels.”

“I wasn’t aware I was lost.” I smiled, thinking Garrison Walker had too many teeth. “I didn’t know Uncle Jefferson was dead.” I knew I should be concentrating, but the man made me nervous. His grin looked like it belonged on a mouth one size larger.

“Your mother didn’t tell you Jefferson died?” Walker asked as he stopped grinning-thank goodness. “We sent her a registered letter the day of his graveside service. He’d listed her phone number and address as the only person to be notified.” Walker paused as if expecting me to fill in a blank. When I didn’t, he added, “Quite frankly, I was surprised when Mr. Platt named you his only heir. I told your mother to let you know of his passing since we had no address on you.”

“Maybe my mother had trouble reaching me. She’s out of the country a great deal,” I managed to mumble as I remembered the string of men who always stood beside her in pictures. She’d send us snapshots from all over the world with little notes on the back like, “Walter and I in Rome,” or “Me and Charles-Paris.” I’d decided years ago that in her odd way she thought she was sharing with us by sending photos. No gifts or calls, just pictures of her and strangers.

“How long ago did he die?” I’d made a point that every time we moved I called and left a message on my mother’s machine. She could have found me, but I didn’t feel like going into family problems with Garrison Walker.

“Almost two months.” Walker lowered his head and sighed. “He had a long life though, dying at the age of eighty-three.”

I couldn’t shake the feeling that Walker was pretending to care. But the information was helpful. His age eliminated any possibility of Jefferson being my father, unless he played football in high school during his fifties.

Walker continued, “Your mother said to send all information to her, and she’d forward it to you, but I’ve been in family law long enough to know to deal directly with the source. Since you are not a minor, I had to locate you.”

Nana found her voice. “Did you hire a P.I. to find Allie?” She loved detective shows. She even told me once that she’d leave my grandpa if McGyver ever came by the farm.

Walker smiled as if talking to a child. “No. When I realized weeks had passed, I went online. I had your legal name and county in which you were born. Within fifteen minutes I’d located your current place of employment.”

“Former employment,” I corrected without explanation. The man could probably piece together my whole life from what he’d learned on the Internet. Places of employment, changes in addresses. Going-nowhere jobs.

To my surprise, Walker looked embarrassed. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you standing. If you’ll step into my office, I’ll need you to sign a few papers, and then the keys are yours. I’m afraid the only money he left was to cover our fees and for your traveling expenses.”

He paused as if expecting me to question him.

I shrugged. I hadn’t expected anything, so Walker’s news wasn’t disappointing. The idea that I had the keys to something I owned, other than my van, was a foreign concept to me.

The lawyer glanced around the empty waiting area as if wishing for clients to appear. “Would you like me to drive you out? I could work it into my schedule.”

“No thanks. I’ve got a map.” Something in the way Walker stared at me gave me the creeps. Mixed signals were bouncing off him. I found myself thinking a little less of Uncle Jefferson for picking him to handle the will. If it’s possible to think less of someone you don’t know.

Walking to the van a few minutes later, I tried to forget about the lawyer. I had the keys. I could leave his problems in his office. They weren’t in my bag of worries.

“Did you notice?” Nana whispered. “That lawyer had wobble eyes.”

Laughing, I had to ask, “What are wobble eyes?” Nana thought she could tell anything from a person’s eyes and most of the time she was right. She told me once that she had Gypsy blood on her mother’s side and Gypsies are all born with a gift for something.

“The lawyer’s eyes wobbled between caring and disliking, maybe even hating. I’ve seen it before a few times in salesmen who used to come around. They’d do their talking, swearing they had one hand on the Bible, but the other would be trying to get into your pocket.” She sat back and crossed her arms. “I don’t like him.”

And that was it, I knew. Nana wouldn’t be changing her mind. “Well,” I consoled, “we’ll probably never see him again.” Cross my heart, I almost added out loud. “We got the keys.”

We drove out of Lubbock, Texas, giggling. Keys! I had keys to my very own place. Some man I never knew, in a place where I’d never been, had left me a house I never even knew existed. Maybe he got my name mixed up with someone else. Maybe he met my mother and figured I was overdue for a break. Maybe he picked me out of the phone book.

It didn’t matter. I didn’t care. If the place was run down and in need of paint, we could fix it up, and what was left of the five thousand would keep us going until I found a job. I had half a degree and a ton of experience doing everything from retail to bookkeeping. I’d find something to keep food on the table. After all, we already had a roof.

We changed into our comfortable clothes at a truck stop on the edge of town. I found a county map plastered to the wall and studied it as I braided my hair. A pinpoint dot marked the forgotten lake community where my place was located. The middle of nowhere, I thought.

When I got back to the van, Nana was staring out at the dry, flat land with an acre of topsoil blowing across our hood. She whispered, “You sure there’s a lake in this country?”

“The man inside said it was about thirty miles from here in a little canyon. He said he thinks it’s an old private community made up of mostly rich folks who want to get out of the city.”

Nana stared at the skyline of Lubbock. “I can see why,” she said. “I was through here a few times when I was young. Nice people, as I remember, but you’d have to have roots growing out of your toes to want to live in this wind.”

Before I could leave the city limits, Nana saw a dollar store and yelled, “Stop.”

I pulled into the parking lot without argument. I had long ago given up trying to understand her fascination with stores where everything cost a buck, but twenty-seven dollars lighter we were back in the car with enough snacks to last a week. Nana still had pioneer blood in her. She believed that wherever we traveled, there might not be food and she needed to be prepared.

Almost an hour later, after two wrong turns, we pulled past the broken-down main entrance to Twisted Creek Community. The gate had been propped up by the side of the road so long ago that morning glory vines almost covered it. From the entrance, the road wound down into a canyon, twisting between brown sagebrush and foot-high spikes of faded buffalo grass.

“Walker said the road makes a circle, so it really doesn’t matter much which way we turn at the gate.” I looked for any sign of life. The place reminded me of a forgotten movie set left to decay in the sun and wind. Everything in the canyon seemed to have turned brown with the fall. The monochromatic landscape might have seemed dull to most people, but I found it a grand study in hues. The wonder of a world painted in browns reminded me of the Civil War photographs by George S. Cook. Dark, haunting, beautiful.

Nana watched as views of the water flashed between the weeds. “Look. I see the creek.”

I slowed, noticing a winding, muddy stream of water with reddish-brown banks on either side. At the base of the canyon, the creek pooled into a lake.

“I remember living near a creek when I was a kid.” Nana rolled down her window. “We used to carry our laundry down beside it every Monday morning. My momma would have my two brothers build a fire while my sister and I filled the wash pot with water and lye soap so strong I could smell it in my nose until Wednesday. Then, while we all played in the stream, she’d wash the clothes and hang them on branches to dry.”

I looked for a mailbox with 6112 on it as I asked the same question I’d asked every time I heard this story. “Why didn’t your mother make all you kids help?”

Nana smiled and repeated what she always said. “Your grandmother liked to do laundry.”

I didn’t correct her that the story was about my great-grandmother. I just nodded, knowing she’d confirmed that craziness runs in the women of my family. The men, it appears, just run, for not one of Nana’s stories ever mentioned her father.

My grandfather, Nana’s Henry, had stayed around. If you can call staying around working from dawn till dusk. Every night he’d stomp in and fall asleep as soon as he ate supper. Same routine every day, seven days a week, until a heart attack took him in the middle of a half-plowed field. He would have hated that.

It seemed strange, but the only memory I have of Henry is him in his recliner with his eyes closed. Maybe that’s why he looked so natural at the funeral. Nana always said he was a good man, but I remembered no good or bad about the man. Except maybe how he liked order in his world. He wanted the same seven meals served at the same time and on the same night of the week. Growing up I always knew what day it was by the smell of supper. I never saw him hit Nana, or kiss her. Their life was vanilla.