I pulled off I-70 because the needle was sitting right on empty and my head was pounding from four hours of turnpike driving. Sedalia was just a cluster of grain elevators and faded brick storefronts under a gray sky that looked like wet concrete. I didn’t care about the town. I just wanted a cup of black coffee from the Casey’s and five gallons of regular unleaded so I could get back to Kansas City before dark.

The pump clicked three times before the nozzle finally seated itself. That was when I heard it.

The man at the next pump over, maybe twenty feet away, was standing with his hands tucked into the pockets of a faded green coat, humming under his breath. It was a low, wandering tune with no real words. Just three notes going down and two coming back up.

Da-da, dee-da.

My hand froze right on the plastic cap. I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. That was the tune my mother Verlene used to hum while she ironed my school shirts on Sunday nights. She used to sit at the edge of my bed when I had the croup, patting my ankle and making that exact sound until my eyes got heavy. When my oldest girl was born, Verlene sat in the rocking chair in the delivery room and hummed it until the baby finally stopped crying. She always told us she made it up out of nowhere when she was nineteen. She said it belonged to us and nobody else.

I stood there by my bumper with the wind cutting right through my sweater, listening to an old man in a Casey’s parking lot hum a song that was supposed to live only in our house.

He was thin and walked slow, the kind of old where the skin on the back of his hands looks like brown parchment paper. He had a gray ball cap pulled down low to keep the wind off his ears. When he finished the little phrase, he didn’t start it over. He just stared down at the concrete like he was waiting for something to happen.

I walked over before I even thought about what I was doing. My boots crunched on some spilled gravel near the hose reel.

“Where did you learn that?” I asked.

My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. He didn’t jump.

He just slowly turned his head, taking his time the way old people do when their joints are stiff. His eyes were pale blue, almost white around the edges, and they looked at me for a long, heavy second without registering anything at all.

“Learn what?” he said. His voice sounded like dry leaves scraping across a driveway.

“The song,” I said, pointing a finger toward the ground between us. “That tune you were humming just now. Where did you get it?”

He let out a short, dry breath that turned into a little puff of white vapor in the cold air. He reached down to hang the fuel nozzle back on the metal rack, making sure the lever clicked into place before he turned back around to face me.

“Your mother taught it to me,” he said. “Long before you were born.”

The parking lot seemed to tilt a little bit. Verlene had been dead for two years, and she had taken every secret she ever owned right down to the cemetery in Warsaw with her.

She was a quiet, narrow-eyed woman who kept her sewing table locked with a little brass key she wore on a chain around her neck. Whenever we asked what was in the drawer, she told us it was just old patterns and spare buttons.

“My mother died in twenty-two,” I told him, my chin starting to shake a little bit. “Her name was Verlene. She never lived around here.”

The old man shook his head slowly. A truck went roaring past on the highway behind us, throwing up a spray of slush that hissed against the asphalt.

“Verlene Miller,” he said. ” Joplin, Missouri. Nineteen-sixty-two.”

That was the year before my parents supposedly met at a church social in Sedalia. That was the year before my father ever laid eyes on her, according to every story told at every Thanksgiving table I ever sat at. My father had always told us he swept her off her feet the second she got off the bus from the Ozarks. He liked to laugh and say she didn’t know what hit her.

“You’re making that up,” I said, and I hated how small I sounded.

“I don’t make things up at my age, honey,” he said. “Ain’t enough time left to waste on it.”

He turned back to his old Chevy truck, climbed up into the cab with a grunt that sounded like he was lifting something heavy, and reached behind the seat. When he stepped back down, he was holding a shoebox wrapped in a thick, yellowed rubber band. The cardboard was soft at the corners, worn down from being handled a thousand times. He walked back over and held it out toward me like it was something fragile that might break if the wind hit it wrong.

“She wrote me,” he said. “Two, three times a year. For forty years. Never had a return address, but I knew the handwriting. She never let me write back, but she let me know you girls were still breathing.”

My legs felt hollow. I didn’t take the box at first, so he just set it down on the trunk of my sedan, right next to the dust and the road salt. The smell hit me before I even touched the lid. It wasn’t old cardboard. It was cedar shavings and cheap dime-store perfume, the exact smell that used to drift out of Verlene’s locked sewing drawer whenever she thought everyone was out of the house.

“Her name wasn’t Miller,” I whispered, staring at the rubber band. “She was a Cartwright.”

” Cartwright was the name her people gave her after the papers went through,” he said, and his voice dropped down so low I had to lean in just to catch the words over the hum of the highway. “Before that, she was mine. Emmett. My name’s Emmett.”

I looked at his face, really looked at it, and for the first time I saw the shape of my sister Marla’s jawline hiding underneath the wrinkles and the gray stubble. It hit me right behind the ribs, that cold, heavy drop you feel when you realize someone has been lying to you your entire life. Verlene didn’t move to Sedalia because she wanted a fresh start. She didn’t marry my father because she fell in love at a church social.

“Why did she leave you?” I asked. My hands were shaking so bad I had to shove them into my pockets to keep him from seeing.

Emmett took off his ball cap and held it against his chest with both hands, his knuckles red from the wind. He looked out past the gas pumps toward the empty fields where the corn had long since been cut down to the stubble.

“Coreen, that’s the part that’s going to be hard to hear,” he said, and his voice didn’t have any fight left in it. “Because it wasn’t her choice, and it wasn’t your grandfather’s either. It was because of who your father really was, and I’m the only one left who can tell you, “