Maggie O'Neil loitered outside Scooter's Café in Finnegan's Stand, Kentucky, working up the nerve to enter the restaurant and inquire about her maternal grandmother—a woman she'd never laid eyes on in all her thirty years. The urge to climb into her car and drive back to Louisville was so powerful her stomach churned with nausea. Rarely did she react to stress physically. After years of being a nurse practioner, her nerves were strong.
She fingered the envelope in the pocket of her hot pink blazer. The letter, already a month old, was barely legible. Maggie had had to enlist the aid of her nursing colleagues to decipher the chicken scratches—incomplete sentences, misspelled words and bizarre phrases such as "It don't make me no nevermind,"
"Pert neer,"
"layin' up" and "Lans sake." In the end, her coworkers had determined that the message had been a request for Maggie to return to her deceased mother's birthplace to retrieve the personal possessions lef ...
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