The address book was leather-bound, cracked along the spine. Her mother had kept it in the nightstand drawer beside a tube of Burt’s Bees and a rosary that belonged to no one she knew — her mother wasn’t Catholic.
Jeanette was going through it name by name. Most entries she recognized: Dr. Petrov (dentist, retired), Aunt Helen (both numbers disconnected), the Yangs from Epworth (still there, still sending Christmas cards three months after the funeral, as if the cards had their own momentum). Her mother’s handwriting was the same on every page — careful cursive, taught as discipline, practiced as habit.
Under M: Ruth Mackey, followed by a street address in Ashland, Oregon. No phone number.
Jeanette didn’t know anyone named Ruth. She didn’t know anyone in Oregon.
She asked her father. He was in the recliner, volume up, the way he did now.
“Did Mom know anyone named Ruth? In Oregon?”
He considered this the way he considered everything since August — carefully, as if one of these questions might eventually explain something.
“Ruth,” he said.
“Ruth Mackey. Ashland.”
“No.”
“She’s in the address book.”
“A lot of people are in the address book.”
This was true. The address book contained sixty-some names spanning forty years, with no apparent principle of inclusion. It had her mother’s hairdresser but not her best friend, who lived six houses down and didn’t need recording. It had the emergency vet from 2003 but not the regular vet. It was a document of a specific kind: not the people her mother knew, but the people her mother might forget.
Ruth Mackey was someone worth remembering and easy to forget.
Jeanette looked her up. The address was real — a house on a street of houses in a neighborhood of old trees. She found a phone number in a public record. She didn’t call. Instead she asked her sister, who lived in Phoenix and handled grief by being organized.
“Ruth Mackey,” her sister said. “Ashland.”
“You know her?”
“I know the name. Mom mentioned her once. Maybe twice. Something about a retreat? Mom went to some kind of retreat in Oregon, or near Oregon, before we were born. Or just after. I don’t remember.”
“A retreat for what?”
“I don’t know. Mom went to things.”
Their mother had gone to things. She had volunteered at the food bank for twenty years and been to Italy once, in 1987, and taken an extension course in watercolor that she’d never mentioned until Jeanette found the paintings in a closet. Their mother had contained more than she exhibited, which shouldn’t have been surprising — it’s true of most people — but felt surprising anyway, the way finding a room in a house you’ve lived in your whole life would feel surprising. Not because the room is remarkable. Because the house had a wall where you thought there was only wall.
She called the number.
A woman answered. Older voice, clear.
“My name is Jeanette Okafor. My mother was Patricia Okafor. She passed away in August. I found your name in her address book.”
A pause. Then: “Patty.”
Nobody called her mother Patty.
“We roomed together at a retreat in ’94. Cannon Beach. Four days.” The voice was warm and remembering. “She was the only person there who actually wanted to talk about the material and not about herself. We wrote letters for a while after that. It must have been — five, six years of letters. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry she’s gone.”
“I didn’t know about the retreat,” Jeanette said. “Or the letters.”
“Well, you wouldn’t,” Ruth said. “We wrote to each other. Not to anyone else. That was the nature of it.”
Jeanette sat with this. Her mother had maintained a correspondence with a woman in Oregon for six years — four-page letters, Ruth would later say, about books and arguments and the specific quality of coastal light — that neither her husband nor her daughters had known about. Not because it was hidden. Because it was private. Because some conversations exist in the space between two people and there isn’t a third seat.
“What did you write about?”
Ruth laughed — short, surprised. “Oh, everything. Your mother had opinions about everything. She’d read something or see something and she’d write me four pages. I’d write back. We disagreed about most things. It was wonderful.”
Jeanette closed the address book after they hung up. The entry was still there — Ruth Mackey, a street in Ashland, no phone number. Four letters wide. A friendship compressed into a name and a line of cursive.
The entry didn’t say: We roomed together at Cannon Beach. She had opinions about everything. We disagreed wonderfully.
The entry said: If I need to reach her, here’s how.
That was all the address book knew how to say.