The Unmaking of June Farrow(14)

I let the laptop slide onto the sofa and stood, my feet taking me back to the kitchen, where the soft sound of wind chimes drifted through the open window. The cord that hung from the phone on the wall was so stretched out that it nearly touched the floor. Ida’s cellphone number was still scratched on the long list pinned to the side of the fridge, but I had it memorized. The chipper voice on the other end answered on the third ring.

“June? Everything okay?”

“Hey, Ida. Yeah, everything’s fine.”

“Oh.” She paused. “Well, good. What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to see if you’d be able to find something for me in the county records.”

“Okay. What is it?”

I stared at the numbers on the phone’s dial pad, where Gran’s fingers had pushed the buttons so many times that they were shiny and smooth. “It’s a marriage license, actually.”

“For whom?” I could hear her plucking a pencil from the old decorated soup can on her desk.

I clenched my teeth, changing my mind twice before I forced myself to say it.

“Last name Rutherford. First name . . . Nathaniel.”

She fell quiet.

“Would have been sometime around 1911,” I added, filling the awkward silence.

“Why on earth would you need that?” She laughed, but it was taut.

I smiled, even though she couldn’t see it, hoping it would somehow bleed into my voice. “Just doing some historical research.”

“All right.” The wheels of her chair squeaked before I heard her nails on the keyboard. “Easy enough, I guess.”

I could imagine her there behind the high counter, chin tipped up so she could read the computer screen through the bifocal area of her glasses.

“Now, let’s see here.” Her voice trailed off as she kept typing. “Got it. What exactly are you looking for?”

“The name of the woman he married.”

The murmur of her reading under her breath was barely audible over the phone, and the damaged cord crackled again, making me wince. She made a sound that was followed by another silence.

“Sorry, Ida. I didn’t hear you.”

“I just—well, this is odd, isn’t it?” Another nervous laugh escaped her.

“What is?”

“It says right here . . .” She began to read. “ ‘Having applied for a license for the marriage of Nathaniel Rutherford, of Jasper’ ”—she took a breath—“ ‘age twenty-five years, to resident of Jasper—’ ”

The phone cut out again and I pinched my fingers to the cord, holding it in place.

“To Susanna. It says Susanna Farrow.”

My fingers slipped from the cord, finding the locket around my neck. I was sure the moment it left her mouth that I’d heard her wrong. That the voice in my mind whispering my mother’s name was just too loud. It was drowning everything else out.

“I’m—I’m sorry?” I stammered.

“That’s what it says, honey. I’m lookin’ at it right now.” She continued, “ ‘. . . united in matrimony Nathaniel Rutherford and Susanna Farrow the parties likened above, on the ninth day of September 1911 at First Presbyterian Church in Jasper.’ ”

I stared at the wall, a numb sensation bleeding through me.

“I didn’t know you all were related to that family.”

“We aren’t,” I said, the words made of air.

“Well, this woman was a Farrow. Doubt that’s a coincidence in a town this small. Your own mother must have been named after her.”

I blinked, fitting her words to the fragments of thought that were struggling to come together. Of course. That would explain it. Maybe someone up the line in the family had married Nathaniel Rutherford. But I didn’t remember Gran ever talking about another Susanna Farrow, and there was no gravestone in the cemetery for one. She’d always been so serious about making sure I knew the family’s history.

Except for when it came to Susanna, I realized.

I swallowed. “Can you find her birth record? Something that has her parents’ names or . . . ?”

“Let’s see.” Ida typed away for a few long seconds before she clicked her tongue. “I don’t see anything for that name. The only one pulling up for a Susanna Farrow is for your mother back in 1966. But you already have all that.”

I did. Thanks to Ida, I had a copy of every scrap of paper on my mother that could be found in the courthouse.

“Not unusual for that time, though.” She thought aloud. “That far back, women birthed babies at home all the time and there wasn’t much reason to record the birth with the county.”

I leaned into the counter, thinking.

“You could try the church,” she said.

“The church?”

“It’s been here longer than the courthouse, and they kept detailed records on births, marriages, and deaths. It’s worth a try if this woman was married to the minister.”

When I said nothing, she spoke again. “Want me to call over there?”

“No, that’s all right. Thanks, Ida.”

“No problem, honey.”

I hung up the phone, one hand still gripped on the receiver as I bit down hard on my thumbnail. In the span of a few moments, that compulsive need I’d had to understand the photograph had turned into a slithering thing. As if the second Ida said my mother’s name, she’d uttered the words of a forbidden spell. The name carried a hallowed kind of resonance. One that had captured the town’s imagination for years and given birth to a hundred stories. So had Nathaniel’s.