It is Wednesday night, the kind of Wednesday where it has rained for two days, and I am in the cozy chair with Mabel claiming most of my left thigh and Grandma's Bible balanced on my right. I had not been planning to read it — I had been planning to sit in the chair and listen to the radiator click and let my hands stop being hands for a while — but Mabel does not believe in lap-sitting on a person who is not also doing something with their hands, so she had been giving me her glaring look from across the room until I picked up the closest thing on the side table, which happened to be Grandma's Bible.

I had it open to nowhere in particular when the page settled itself on Joshua.

There is a thing Bibles do, when they have been loved. They fall open at the verses their owner returned to. Grandma's Bible falls open to Romans 8 — I knew that already, that's the one that found me, the verse with my name written in margins — and to Lamentations 3 and to Psalm 23 and, apparently, also to Joshua 1, which I had not known about until tonight.

The verse was underlined twice — once in pencil, once in pen — which was Grandma's signal for I came back to this one. Underneath it, in her cramped left-handed scrawl, was a margin note, and the margin note said this:

For S. — read this when you're scared.

I sat in the chair with Mabel breathing on me, and I read the verse, and I said the letter out loud to no one.

"S."

I did not know who S. was. I knew, the way you know a thing in your chest before you know it in your head, that it was probably my mother. Grandma had only had the one daughter. Grandma had only written for anybody twice in this whole Bible — once in Romans, the year Rena LeeAnn was born, and now this, undated, in handwriting that might have been any age. There were not a lot of other candidates. But the note didn't say Linda, and Grandma had not been a woman who shortened a name unless she was being tender, and tender was not a word my mother would have let her be — and so the S. sat there on the page, possible, unconfirmed, with the verse underneath it that said —

Be strong and of good courage. Be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.

I was twelve years old the summer I learned what that verse felt like in a body. I had not known until tonight that it had been given to my mother first.

The summer I was twelve, my parents let me spend a week at Grandma's by myself, which they would not have done if they had known what Grandma was going to do with me.

Grandma lived ninety minutes from us, on a small piece of land her husband had left her, in a yellow farmhouse with a kitchen wall covered in a clock shaped like a cat whose tail swung back and forth at the seconds.[^1] She kept the radio on. She drank her coffee weak with three sugars, which is a crime against everything I now believe about coffee, and which I have honored exactly once a year since she died by making myself the worst pot of coffee a human being can make and drinking it standing at the kitchen counter. She grew tomatoes. She had not, in the years I'd been alive, ever come to our church, and my mother would not say why, but I had figured out that it was because Grandma did not believe the things my mother believed about how women should dress and how children should be raised and how God should be obeyed. Grandma believed, as far as I could tell, that God was kind, and that most other things were optional.

The first three days of the visit were quiet. We weeded. We baked. She let me read in the chair by the window and did not ask me to be doing anything more useful. On the fourth morning, after breakfast, she said: "Get your boots."

"Where are we going?"

"Back behind."

I knew what was back behind. There were woods back behind, and beyond the woods there was a creek, and the creek had been pointed out to me, every visit, by my mother, who said the words off limits the way other mothers said don't run with scissors. The creek was off limits. The woods that led to the creek were also, by extension, off limits. The creek had been off limits since I had been old enough to know what a creek was.

I told Grandma this. I told her the way you tell a stranger who is about to step into traffic.

"Grandma, the creek is —"

"I know," Grandma said. "Get your boots."

There is a particular kind of fear that lives in the lungs of an Independent Fundamental Baptist child who has been given a direct rule by her mother and who is now, against her will, being walked toward the violation of that rule by her grandmother. It is not the same as the fear of getting in trouble. It is closer to the fear of becoming someone you weren't supposed to be. I remember the path. I remember the way the light came down through the trees in chunks. I remember the sound of mosquitoes, which were everywhere that summer, and the way Grandma had a way of waving them off her face that made it look like a benediction.

She did not say anything for most of the walk. Grandma was not a chatty woman. She walked the way she did everything, which was without explanation.

The creek, when we got to it, was not impressive. It was maybe ten feet across, with smooth brown stones on the bottom, and the water was so cold it made the air above it cold. There was a bank of moss on the near side and a bank of clay on the far side, and a fallen log halfway across, and that was all. It was the kind of creek a person would walk past without comment.

Grandma sat down on the log.

"Take your boots off," she said.

"What?"

"Boots off. Pants up. Get in."

"Grandma, Mom said —"

"I know what your mother said."

"She said —"

"Rena LeeAnn." She said my name the way she always said it, with both pieces, the way nobody else in the world said it. "Take your boots off."

I took my boots off. I rolled my pants up to my knees, which was already a violation of two separate things my mother believed about modesty. I stood at the edge of the creek and looked at the water, and I did not move.

"It's cold," Grandma said. "It's also fine."

"What if —"

"Rena."

I stepped into the water and the cold made my bones ring. The stones on the bottom were smooth and slippery and exactly the size of the arch of my foot. I had never, in twelve years, been in a body of moving water — I had been in bathtubs, I had been twice in a chlorinated swimming pool at Bible camp wearing a one-piece swimming dress that came below my knees, but I had never been in a creek. I had never felt water move past my ankles like it had somewhere it needed to be.

I stood there and waited, I think, for something to happen — for God to strike me, or for my mother to materialize out of the trees, or for the water itself to register the sin of my participation in it and reject me. None of those things happened. The water kept moving. The mosquitoes hovered. A bird I didn't know the name of made a sound like a question mark in a tree behind me.

After a minute or two, I started to laugh. I didn't mean to. It came out the way laughter does when your body has been holding something it didn't realize it was holding.

Grandma watched me from the log. She didn't laugh with me. She didn't laugh at me either. She just watched, the way she watched bread in the oven, like waiting was its own form of attention.

When I finally came out of the water and sat down beside her on the log to put my boots back on, my feet bright pink and stinging, she said the thing.

"Your mother is afraid of a lot of things, Rena LeeAnn."

I looked up at her.

"That doesn't have to be your inheritance."

I did not know, at twelve, what an inheritance was, except in the way it was used in Bible stories about Jacob and Esau. I assumed she meant money. I nodded the way you nod when an adult has said something you do not understand and you do not want them to know you do not understand, and she seemed satisfied. We walked back to the house. She made grilled cheese. We did not talk about it again, that visit, or any other, because Grandma died of a heart attack when I was fourteen, and the funeral was held by people who would have called the creek rebellion, and so the creek was the last thing she gave me out loud.

In the cozy chair, eighteen years later, I held Grandma's Bible open to Joshua 1 and looked at the words for S. and understood — Grandma had been giving the same thing to my mother first.

I do not know when. The margin note doesn't have a date. It could have been before my mother was married, or when my mother was pregnant with me, or anytime — the fall of any year, the morning after any phone call. Read this when you're scared. She had handed it over, in writing, and whoever S. was had not been able to take it.

That is not the kind of thing that makes me angry. I am too aware of what it costs to take it. I sat there in the chair and I felt, for a second, something I had not let myself feel before about Linda — grief. Just a small one. Grief for a woman who might have been offered a verse by her own mother, in handwriting, and could not put it on like a coat. Grief for someone who is still alive but has not, in the part of her where this verse would have lived, been able to receive it.

That's not the same as forgiveness, exactly. But it's the same neighborhood.

Mabel woke up the way cats do, all at once, and decided to relocate. She launched herself off my lap, the Bible slid, and I caught it with two fingers in the page — which is how I know that some inheritances are the kind your hands learn before your head does.

I got up and made coffee.

I made it the way I make it when something has happened that I do not yet know how to think about: a pour-over of the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, the bag Marcus blends for me at Riverside, the one Noah named in a note that I keep in the drawer below Betsy. I used Margaret's wooden scoop. I used Margaret's wooden scoop the way I always use it now, which is carefully, because it is not a thing that can be replaced. The water boiled. I poured. The kitchen smelled like jasmine, which is what Yirgacheffe smells like when it's roasted right and brewed by someone who has been studying coffee since she was ten.

I brought the cup back to the chair. Mabel had reclaimed the corner of it. The rain had not stopped.

I sat down with the coffee in one hand and the pencil in the other, and I underlined Joshua 1:9 a third time, very lightly, because it is Grandma's Bible and I did not want to crowd her marks. Underneath her for S., in my handwriting that has always looked a little like hers, I wrote one word.

Received.

I closed the Bible. I set it back on the side table. The radiator clicked. I drank my coffee, which was the best coffee I'd made all week — which was a thing I noticed and did not interpret, because not everything has to be a sign.

I did not feel afraid tonight.

That is not the same thing as never being afraid again.

But — and I am learning to be careful with this kind of sentence — it counts.

[^1]: The cat clock had cataracts by the time I was nine. One of its eyes had stopped tracking. It was, even then, a terrible clock. I have not been able to find one like it since.