One page read: When you do not know how to keep going, you keep going anyway, and the going is what teaches you.
Another read: The things that are yours are yours because of the work you have put into them, not because someone permitted you to have them. This is true even when someone tries to take them. What they take is the object. What is yours is the work, and the work is still yours, and from the work you make the next thing.
I read it twice.
I read it a third time.
Sitting in the orange light of the storage unit, the wooden chair beneath me, the sewing machine at my back, the boxes of Estelle’s life all around, I thought about Daniel, the house, the eight hundred dollars, the two suitcases, the drive to the duplex with Lily asleep in the back seat, and the two years since — about the rent due in ten days, the school clothes in September, the question mark still hanging over the job.
I thought about the soup I’d made the night before, the kind I made when loneliness showed up because cooking was something I could do about it.
I thought about what it means to build something out of almost nothing.
I drove home.
On the way, I stopped at a coffee shop in the small town and sat for an hour with the notebook and a cup of coffee. I’d brought the notebook along with me. I’d locked the storage unit and kept the key, hadn’t decided yet what to do with everything else inside, but the notebook had come with me because I’d understood, sitting there with it in my hands, that it was what Albert had meant to give me, and the rest could wait.
I read more of it over the coffee. I jotted a note in my phone of what I wanted to return to — the bread recipe, the page about telling children the truth about difficulty, a section near the middle Estelle had titled simply What Works, a list of practical strategies, specific and grounded, made by someone who’d tested every item on it.
I called Grace on the way home and thanked her again.
Then I thought about whether to try to find Albert.
The question stayed with me for several days. I had nothing to go on beyond the letter and what I’d seen on the porch during the storm. I didn’t know his last name. I knew the town where the storage unit was, which presumably meant some tie to the area, but a man who’d been moving for eight months could be anywhere.
