Foster Boon was a man who had been in Savannah long enough to recognize the sound of an old story.
He said, “Come in tomorrow morning at 7. Back door. I’ll have coffee.”
That morning, in his back workshop, with the lights on low and Foster Boon in his apron at the front counter watching for traffic, I took my own album down off his shelf and opened it.
It was empty, of course.
I turned it over.
I took out my tools.
I lifted the inside backboard lining with a thin spatula.
The lining was held with a contact adhesive.
I had loosened that kind of adhesive a hundred times.
It came up clean.
Underneath the lining, between the back coverboard and the leather, was a small hollow space about half an inch deep.
Foster Boon had built it that way for binder rigidity.
There was room.
I had brought the packet with me.
14 archival prints of my 14 baby photographs, each one in its own glassine sleeve, stacked together no thicker than three-eighths of an inch.
One archival copy of my grandmother’s handwritten will, folded in thirds.
One archival copy of my grandmother’s letter to me, folded in thirds.
One archival copy of the DNA report.
One certified copy of Caroline’s Bowfort County birth abstract.
One short typed note from Owen Sloan confirming that the original petition would be filed in Chattam County Probate Court on the Friday before the wedding, two days from then.
I laid them flat.
I lowered the lining.
I readhered it with a methyl-cellulose paste, which is reversible, archival, and indistinguishable from the original adhesive.
Within 12 hours of drying, I pressed the lining flat with a small bone folder.
I closed the album.
It weighed 8 o heavier than its mate.
My mother, who measured the world in calligraphy pens and church gossip, would never notice 8 o.
Foster Boon walked me to the back door at 7:40.
He said, “Miss Petra, I do not know what you are doing. I am quite sure I do not want to know. I will tell you one thing.”
“Yes?”
“Your grandmother bound a leather journal with me 3 years before she passed. She picked it out for you. She told me, ‘Foster, if Petra Whitam ever walks into your shop on her own, you help her.’ That’s it. That’s all she said.”
I started to thank him.
He waved me off.
“Margaret was a hard woman to disappoint,” he said. “Don’t disappoint her.”
I drove the album back to my apartment.
I left it on my kitchen counter so that I could see it from across the room.
It looked exactly like its mate.
It was not its mate.
Aunt Hattie called me that night.
She said, “I’m coming Friday.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to sit in the back in a green hat under the name Haddie Lockwood Pace. Your mother won’t recognize the name unless she’s been paying attention.”
“She has never been paying attention.”
“Aunt Hattie.”
“Yes, child?”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank Margaret. I’m just delivery.”
I slept that night with the album on the nightstand beside me, Theo’s arm across my ribs, the river outside my apartment window.
The night before my wedding, I did not dream.
Chapter 9: The confrontation
The wedding morning was perfect Savannah weather.
68° at sunrise, climbing to 76 by noon, the air clean from a Thursday rain.
The ceremony was in a small Episcopal chapel on Ogulthorp Avenue at 11.
The reception was at the Mercer Williams House Gardens on Mterrey Square at 1.
92 guests on the seating chart.
Two physicians and a priest at the head table.
I got ready in a side room of the chapel.
My bridesmaids, three friends from SCAD, none of them family, pinned my veil.
My mate of honor was my college roommate, a woman named Susanna Kger, and she had been told the week before the basic shape of what was going to happen at the reception.
She had asked one question.
“Where do you want me standing when it happens?”
“Two steps behind me, with a glass of water in case I need to keep talking after.”
She nodded.
Caroline came in around 10:30 to see if I needed anything.
She wore a pale blue mother-of-the-bridesmaid kind of dress that our mother had ordered for her, even though there is no such role at a wedding.
She kissed my cheek.
She said, “Mom is so excited about her gift. Don’t be mean about it, okay? She’s worked really hard.”
“I won’t be mean about it, Caroline.”
She paused.
She said, “I love you.”
I looked at her.
I said, “I know you do.”
I meant it.
She did love me in the way an oblivious child loves a sibling she has been told is the difficult one.
She had not been the one who built any of this.
She had been built around it.
The ceremony was clean and short.
The priest, a kind man named Father Eastston, knew nothing.
He gave a homaly about the small acts of restoration that make a marriage last.
And I almost laughed at that in front of God and 90 guests because a homaly about restoration was the closest thing to prophecy I had ever heard.
Theo kissed me.
The chapel emptied.
We walked out under Bird of Paradise petals at 12:30.
The reception garden was already set when we arrived.
The cake on a side table.
The DJ adjusting his levels.
The seating cards in tidy rows.