“Miss Carter, your grandmother asked me to give you one more thing,” the lawyer said again, in his dry, careful voice, and he slid a long cream envelope across the polished desk. “But first, I must ask you a question. Have you shown the certificates to anyone?” I shook my head. I had driven the forty two envelopes to his office in the trunk of my Honda, wrapped in my coat, and I had not slept in two nights. “Good,” he said. “Then you are the only person living who knows the secret of R, besides me.” He folded his hands. “I think you had better sit down.” I was already sitting. I sat down harder.
The envelope contained a letter in the elegant, looping hand of my grandmother. Dear Jessica, if you are reading this, I am gone, and the aunts have taken what they thought was valuable. I knew they would. Do not be angry. I raised them to want things, and I regret it. I want to tell you who R is. His name was Reginald Ashby. He founded the bottling company in Atlanta. In 1961, I was twenty six years old, and I was hired as a private nurse for a very sick man. He had suffered a stroke. His company would have collapsed if the news got out. For fourteen months, I lived in his house and told no one.
I read the letter standing at the window, in the thin afternoon light. Grandma wrote that she had nursed R through his recovery, teaching him to walk again, to hold a fork, to speak a sentence without stumbling. He had been a hard, proud man. He had cried in her arms one night in the fall of 1962 and told her that nobody had ever stayed. When he was well, he had paid her a small fortune in cash, and she had refused. So he had given her stock instead, and promised he would send her one more certificate every year, for as long as he lived, to thank her for her silence.
Forty two envelopes in an attic box held a secret her grandmother kept for decades and a gift for the granddaughter who read to her.
He kept his promise for forty two years. She never sold a single share. She never told her daughters, because she did not trust them with a secret that could unmake a company. She tucked each certificate in a plain envelope and tied the bundle with a ribbon and hid it in the attic, under the Christmas decorations, where no one would look. She wrote, I knew you would be the one. You are the only one who ever listened to me read. I saw the ribbons on the shelf and the way you handled the books. I put them in your box because they are yours. Not because you need them. Because you will know what to do.
The lawyer waited until I lowered the page. “Miss Carter, I have taken the liberty of having the certificates evaluated,” he said. “Those fifty shares were issued in 1962. The company has split its stock a number of times since then. The forty two certificates together are now worth, by my rough calculation, six million, four hundred thousand dollars.” He cleared his throat. “That figure is not final. It is not to be shared.” I put my hand on the windowsill. The room tilted a little, and I laughed, a high, strange, helpless laugh, and tears came down my cheeks. I said, “I teach tenth grade English.”
I did not tell my aunts for a month. I carried the secret around like a candle in a draft. Then one Sunday, Aunt Denise called to ask if I would come to the house to help sort the last of the last dishes. I went. We sat in the kitchen, the three of us, Sharon and Denise and I, drinking coffee from the old yellow cups. For a while nobody said anything. At last Sharon said in a stiff voice, “Jess, we have not been very kind.” Denise said, “No.” They looked at me, each of them, in the same stricken way, and I knew, at once, that I could not hold the secret any longer.
I told them everything. I told them about R and the stroke, and the certificates, and what they were worth. They sat very still. Denise put her hand on her chest. Sharon said, “Oh, Mama.” For a long moment, I thought one of them would cry out in rage, or accuse me, or demand a share. Instead, to my great surprise, Sharon began to laugh. She laughed until she had to put her head down on the table. “She fooled us,” she said, gasping. “She fooled us both. All those years. Sitting there in her chair like an innocent.” Denise wiped her eyes. “She was the cleverest of all of us.”
I told them what I had decided. I would give each of them a quarter of the value, as a gift, because Grandma would have wanted it, and because it was right. A million and a half dollars apiece. The rest I would use to do what she had done all her life, quietly and without announcement. I would set up a foundation to put books in the hands of children in Macon, in the name of Hattie Carter. I would fund a reading room at the county library. Denise was weeping openly now. Sharon reached across and took my hand. “Jess,” she said, “we did not deserve you.” I said, “The thing is, nobody does. That is why it is a gift.”
The Hattie Carter Reading Room opened in the spring, in a sunny corner of the Macon library, with a rocking chair by the window and a shelf of picture books. I read there every Sunday afternoon. Children came and sat on the rug, and I read them the stories my grandmother used to read to me, in her voice, slow and rich as honey.
I kept the ribbon. It is a plain blue satin ribbon, faded to the color of an old sky, the one that bound the forty two envelopes. I tied it around the spine of a small book on my own shelf. Sometimes, when I am marking essays late at night, I run my thumb along it. R sent the certificates, and Grandma kept the secret, and neither of them ever asked for thanks. The best gifts, I think, are the ones that wait in the attic, under the Christmas decorations, for the right granddaughter to come along and read the letters.
