I stared at the money order line for a while.

“Miss Hayward.” She dropped her voice a little.

“If I were you, I’d get my own lawyer this week, not next week.”

Grandma kept her phone ledgers in the left drawer of the oak desk, tied up with kitchen string, one book for every year.

She logged every long-distance call in her slanted handwriting.

Name, date, minutes.

It was the habit of a woman who had once counted pennies alongside her husband in a mill town and had never quit counting.

I started with the year before her last one and worked my way backward by lamplight with the drawer still pulled open.