I asked at the shelter in town. I described him. The woman at the desk was kind and explained she couldn’t share information about residents or former residents, which I understood, but said that if someone matching his description came in, she could pass along a message.
I left one.
It said: the soup was the best thing I had made in a long time too. Thank you for Estelle’s book.
I had no idea whether it would reach him.
Lily came home on Sunday.
She burst through the door with the particular energy of a child readjusting from one weekend elsewhere back to the different rhythm of this home — the home where things are smaller and simpler, where the rules differ, where the one waiting is me instead of her father. She dropped her bag in the hallway and gave me the compressed summary of her weekend that a ten-year-old gives, in which the important events aren’t necessarily the ones the adults would have chosen.
I had soup on the stove.
She came and stood beside me, looked in the pot, and said it smelled like the good kind.
“The good kind,” I confirmed.
We ate at the table, just the two of us, and I told her I wanted to show her something afterward. She was curious in that specific performing-indifference way ten-year-olds have, meaning she was extremely curious.
Once the dishes were done, I showed her the notebook, sitting at the kitchen table with it between us. I told her about the storm, Albert, the porch, the soup, the morning I’d found the folded blanket on the doormat. She listened with the full attention she brought to things that genuinely interested her, a quality I’d been watching grow in her since she was very young — the ability to be completely present inside a story.
I told her about the storage unit, about Estelle, about what the notebook held.
“She wrote all of it down,” Lily said.
“Everything she knew,” I said.
“So it wouldn’t be lost,” she said.
“Yes.”
She looked at the notebook with the expression she wore when weighing something from more than one direction at once.
“Can I read it?”
“Some of it is for later,” I said. “Some of it you’ll understand now.”
She read the first page, Estelle’s introduction, slowly, the way she read things she was taking seriously, and when she finished, she looked up at me.
