Eventually, he became too weak to even walk from the bathroom to his recliner in the living room, let alone out to the Wabash River. Lou Gehrig’s disease ravaged his nerve cells until they withered like leaves scorched by the sun.

She remained grateful he hadn’t been alive to see her pregnant at seventeen. But during those nine months carrying her son, she stopped by the river when she was sure no one else would be around to “talk to” Papa and ask for advice. She needed his wisdom.

As she entered downtown Ganton, a few of the old family-owned stores stood as skeletons, hollowed out and emptied, replaced by big-box retailers on the outskirts of town. Chesterton Road cut through the center of town, but the street seemed smaller than she remembered, as if time had shrunk it somehow in the few years since she’d last visited.

Parking downtown, Ruth got out of her car. She trudged through the snow until she arrived at Lena’s This ’n’ That, a small shop, which fortunately looked just as tired as she had remembered it, with worn red-and-white-checkered curtains at the windows.

In high school, Ruth would stop by the store after school to see Lena, the white woman who owned it, and buy green apple Jolly Ranchers just to get away from Mama. After Papa died, Mama had no one to bathe and nurse, so the idleness coupled with grief consumed her, and she fussed over everything from a fork that still had food stuck to it after a washing to a layer of dust behind the TV that had been neglected.

We may be poor, but we’re clean, Mama would admonish.

Lena had to be at least twenty years younger than Mama, but the two had been fast friends for a long time. Ruth paused outside the door. Did Lena know Ruth’s secret? In a town like Ganton, where gossiping was as natural as breathing, you couldn’t tell people to mind their own business. You had no business that wasn’t theirs, too. But she couldn’t bring herself to go to Mama’s house just yet. They hadn’t seen each other in four years and only spoke by phone every couple of months. What would she and her grandmother talk about? How would she get Mama to tell her who her son was?

The chimes jingled when she walked in the store. A few customers were milling about fingering knickknacks and comparing Christmas shopping lists. A young woman with eyes the color of blueberries and legs like twigs stepped from behind the counter.

“Hi. You’re not from around here. Visiting someone?” Her bony fingers stroked beads on a necklace.

“I was born and raised here, but it’s been a while since I’ve been back.” Ruth heard the defensiveness in her own tone.

The girl bounced when she talked, like a wind-up toy. “Can I help you find something? By the way, your bag is really cool.”

Ruth rubbed the leather of her Kate Spade bag and chastised herself silently for not traveling with something more generic and nondescript. Less expensive.

“Thanks. I need two jars of blackberry preserves.” Mama always spread preserves on her buttermilk biscuits Sunday mornings before church.

While the girl went to get the preserves, Ruth noticed a collage of photos on poster board near the cash register: a man, woman, and three kids who had to be theirs, judging by the similar wide faces, pale skin, and wheat-colored hair. Each set of children’s eyes an exact duplicate of the others and their parents’. She marveled at the way the threads of their chromosomes were woven together in a quilt of connection. Somewhere was a child with Ruth’s genes, her DNA running through him like a river.

“Those are the Wagners,” the girl said over her shoulder. “It’s terrible what happened.” When Ruth looked confused, she continued. “They were using a space heater to keep warm and their house caught on fire. That’s J.B. and Gabe right there.” She pointed to two round-faced boys with big smiles.

“They were in the hospital for a few days, but they made it, thank God. So did Mr. and Mrs. Wagner. Polly, the little girl, was the youngest. She got out alive but ended up dying a couple hours later.”

There were often news stories in Chicago about people tragically dying like that, too poor to afford heat. On a few winter nights back in the day, Ruth’s family had gathered around the open oven to stay warm.

The cashier said, “They came in here all the time and Polly would sit by the register and punch in the numbers for me. My little helper.”

“She liked fishing, too, I see.” Ruth eyed a photo of Polly posing in a pink jumper in front of her dad with an openmouthed striper that was almost as big as she was.

“She sure did. Don’t let the pink fool you. She caught that one herself, from what I hear tell of it.”

Polly had, no doubt, like Ruth, learned patience from her father, the hours of waiting until that rod twitched in your hands. And she’d likely known the reassuring voice of a father who made you believe you could do anything. A Folger’s coffee can sat next to the photos of the Wagners, with the label ripped off and lined notebook paper wrapped around it, taped, with the word donations scrawled in heavy black marker.

Ruth looked again at this mother and father in the photo and thought of how they walked through the world now with limp and idle arms, empty arms that had once held their Polly.

She never carried large amounts of cash except when she traveled, so she pulled a fifty-dollar bill from her purse and stuffed it in the can, ignoring the wide eyes of the girl behind the register as she handed over the jars of preserves.

“Is Lena here?” Ruth asked.