My Sweet Annie

40

When Ana arrived that night, she looked as exhausted as I felt after my forage through Gran's crowded "attic," an unfinished storage room on the second level of the house. The estate sale people were going to have a blast in there: there were boxes of old clothes and toys, stacks of books, and a variety of random old furnishings and decor items, much of which was probably antique. I had found Gran's seasonal decorations for inside the house, too, including her Christmas tree and the tablecloth I knew my mother would want.

"You made me dinner?" Ana exclaimed.

"I warmed you up dinner." I put a plate of broccoli casserole and a side salad in front of Ana and took my seat across from her. "But you can give me credit for the salad. That required shaking the bottle of dressing and counting out even numbers of tomatoes for each plate."

"I love a woman who evenly distributes salad garnishes."

As we ate, I told Ana about the letters I'd found in the cracker tin that had been hidden in the ash tree near the house. When we had stowed our dinner dishes in the dishwasher, I showed her the letters and the tiny pair of booties.

After she put the last letter down, Ana looked up at me, her eyes shadowed. "It doesn't sound like your grandpa was a fan of Anna's."

"I know."

"I'm getting a bad feeling about this, Tabitha."

"Me, too."

She picked up the crocheted booties, cradling them in one palm. "They're so tiny. She must have made them."

"That's what I thought, but how did they get out here? Hidden a tree, with these specific letters? Royal must have put it all there."

"Which he would only have done if he wanted to hide something."

A heavy trepidation followed us out of the kitchen and into the living room. We decided to tackle Gran's older diary first, because the most recent entry we'd read from her 2018 diary had referenced finding the letter tucked into the pages of the older book, and because whatever Gran had known about Anna when she was young would be closer to whatever had happened.

She had been a more dedicated diarist when she was a girl than when she had tried again at 81. She'd written nearly every day, although most of her entries were just a line or two:

We had cream corn for dinner: DESGUSTING.

School today was boring.

I saw Peter Altman at church today. He is so handsome.

The entries were simple, clearly the writings of a young teenager, but they were powerful all the same. Ana and I traded grins and occasional giggles as we read, sitting together on the couch.

It was strangely powerful, too, reading those old, inconsequential entries. They were proof not just that Gran had lived, but proof that she'd once been a little girl, just like I had. She had struggled with spelling. She'd had crushes on boys. She had hated math and a number of vegetables, and she had loved watermelon. I read every line slowly, sometimes more than once, savoring the loops and angles of Gran's handwriting—both less refined than her mature script and far more elegant than anything I could hope to produce at more than twice her age. Here and there on the pages was a blotch or a smudge and I wondered whether she had stained her diary pages with sticky fingers or a smear of pencil lead as she lay on her belly on her bed, scribbling away to record her daily joys and sorrows.

As we read, most of the entries faded into the background, giving me the general sense of a young girl living a normal life, but a few of the entries stood out.