The Heartland Nursing Home was a long, low, tidy building divided from the road by a well-kept parking lot. It was in Eldora, one of the small towns near Gran's hometown of Myrtle. Across the street were the Green Prairie Retirement Apartments, where I could be reasonably certain that Uncle Royal lived. It was nice he could be so close to his wife; although the road dividing the properties was technically a highway, it was quiet, and it would be just a short walk between Royal's home and Mary Ellen's.

The entry to the nursing home smelled like fresh paint and cleaning products. Past the front desk was a door with a keypad above the handle and what appeared to be an alarm light on the wall above it. I had heard that many nursing homes had strict security, with locked doors and alarms for the safety of the residents with dementia. My heart twisted at the thought of my great aunt wandering the street alone, confused. I wondered how bad her Alzheimer's was. Gran hadn't talked much about it, and before the past few days I had never even talked on the phone with Uncle Royal, let alone his wife.

"Who are you here to see, honey?" asked the pleasant-faced receptionist. Or maybe she was a nurse. She wore scrubs patterned with cartoonish butterflies.

"Mary Ellen Haas." I adjusted my grasp on the bag of food I was carrying: a carton of fried chicken, coleslaw, and biscuits.

She smiled, jotting something down on a clipboard before squinting up at me. "Well, you're not Ellen."

It took me a second to understand. Ellen was Royal and Mary Ellen's daughter. I had seen her at the funeral, but she was another relative I felt I didn't know. "No, sorry. My name is Tabitha Carter. I'm her grand niece. Or great niece. I'm not sure what you call me."

She chuckled, sliding the clipboard and a pen toward me across the counter. "Just sign in. She'll be so pleased to see you. The Reverend is here, too."

I leaned in to sign my name and jot down the time of my arrival. "Good. I brought them dinner."

"I thought I smelled something yummy. I'll buzz you in. Have a good visit, honey."

"Thank you."

The door did indeed buzz a moment later, and then something clicked. When I tried the latch, it opened easily, and I stepped through into the nursing home proper. There was a sign on the wall right there with directions to residents' rooms, and I started down the hall toward Aunt Mary Ellen's, 1202. On the way, I passed a couple of residents with walkers and one in a wheelchair who had a baby doll tucked in her arms. I smiled politely, uncomfortable among strangers and in a completely unfamiliar place.

When I arrived, the door stood ajar, and I could hear low voices from inside Mary Ellen's room. I rapped with my knuckles on the door frame.

"Come in!" Royal called. I nudged open the door to see a neat room with large windows. The walls were beige, the curtains soft green. The floor, tiny dining table, and small dresser were all a cheerful, yellowish wood laminate. Family photographs decorated the walls, along with a landscape I suspected my grandmother had painted. The bed was neatly made, but the folded quilt could not conceal the wheels and cords beneath it, a subtle reminder that this was a room in a medical facility.

In a dark green armchair in the corner of the room sat Royal, with a newspaper and a pencil in his hands. He was in his mid-eighties, his hair the color of steel. His eyebrows were darker, emphasizing his clear blue eyes. He wore a button-down shirt, slacks, a belt, and loafers, clothes that would have seemed formal on anybody else but suited him well—I couldn't imagine my great uncle in anything else.

Next to Royal was Mary Ellen in her wheelchair, another quilt draped over her lap. She had a pale, round, wrinkled face beneath a cloud of white hair still shadowed here and there with gray. She peered at me, her eyes vague behind wire-framed glasses. She was wearing a pale pink sweatshirt with an image embroidered on the front of goldfinches and wild roses.

"Come in, come in," Royal said, gesturing me farther into the room. "We were just doing the Sunday crossword. Sweetheart, you know who this is, now, don't you?"

Mary Ellen reached for Royal, who took her hand as she turned her face toward him. "Who's this?" she asked.

"It's your niece, Tabitha. Tabbit the Rabbit, Ruth used to call her. Do you remember?"

"Oh, yes." She nodded, but I had the notion that she was acknowledging his memory more than her own. "Tabitha."

"I brought dinner," I said, raising the bag of food. "Uncle Royal said that the Crossroads has the best chicken in the world."

He chuckled, pushing himself up from his armchair. He approached me, extending his arms, and I smiled, stepping into his brief embrace. "It's good to see you," he said. "Thank you for stopping by."

"I really looked forward to talking with you," I said, and despite my awkwardness, it was true. I wanted to talk to them, to get to know them a little better. My family had always been small, but it could feel a bit bigger with Royal and Mary Ellen in it. "And to trying this chicken."

"Let me take that for you," he said.

"Oh, I've got it. Just on the table over here?"

"That's just fine. Mary Ell, are you hungry?"

"Am I what?"

"Are you hungry?" he repeated, a little louder, turning back to her.

"I think I ate already."

"You did. We had some lunch. But it's been a few hours now. It's about dinner time."

"Oh."

"Come on over to the table, and we'll get you a few bites." He edged behind her chair and took the handlebars, easing her toward the small dining table. We would be cozy there, the three of us trying to fit into a space meant for one or two at the table set against the wall.

"I should have thought ahead," I said. "I didn't bring any plates or silverware."

"Don't worry about that. We've got some over in the closet," said Royal.

I looked around the room. The door to a small bathroom stood ajar, but there was a closed door next to it. I went over, and as I opened it up, Royal added, "Just on the shelf in there, there's a bag."

Sure enough, there was a reusable grocery tote on the shelf that contained paper plates, napkins, and plastic flatware. I took out enough for the three of us and brought it back to the table. We arranged ourselves there, me sitting across from Mary Ellen and Royal between us. I tried not to stare as Royal made his wife a plate, carefully shredding bites of chicken off of the bone and giving her just a couple of dollops of coleslaw and half of a biscuit slathered with butter from a tiny packet. He made sure she was eating before he helped himself to a plate.

"This really is good." I wiped my fingers on a napkin, offering Royal a smile.

He laughed. "I told you. We don't get out and about too much any more, so it's a treat. Not as good as Mary Ellen's, though. She was always the most wonderful cook."

She smiled, looking from him to me. "Oh, yes. My children still call me for my recipes."

"But what do they always say?" Royal asked. "They always say it won't be as good as when you made it."

Mary Ellen looked pleased, and I was warmed by the clear affection between them. Imagine having been married for so long and still being happy in one another's company. I thought about Colson and what it might have been like to marry him. Could we have made it?

I didn't think so. Not like these two.

"How are things going out at the house?" Royal asked.

"Slowly, but surely. I'm just taking an inventory of things before I start to talk with anybody about an estate sale. It's actually one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today."

"An estate sale?"

"No, I mean—if there's anything you might want from the house. I wanted to set anything aside that you want to keep."

"Oh. Oh." He took a forkful of coleslaw, frowning at his plate. "I hadn't thought about that."

"You have a little time to think about it. There are some things I'll bring to you anyway. I found a baby picture of you. Lots of other photos I haven't even been through yet. There are probably a lot of them you might want to see."

"I'm sure we'd enjoy looking at pictures."

"Just let me know if there's anything else that comes to mind, okay? For both of you." I smiled at Mary Ellen. "Gran has some beautiful afghans—I don't know where they came from, whether she made them or maybe Great Grandma Helen did, but there's a ton of them and I'd hate to sell them. And her paintings, too, if there were any of those you both might like to keep."

"Your mother didn't want them?" Royal asked.

"Oh, I'm certain she'll have her favorites, like Tim and I will, but there are so many."

"Melinda should have anything she wants, first and foremost. There's nothing like losing a mother. Nothing at all," Royal said. "I never had anything of my mother's after she died."

This took me aback. I glanced around Mary Ellen's small room, as if I might see a couple of Grandma Helen's things. "You didn't? Why not?"

He shook his head. "Ruth asked me many times to come out to the house and help her go through things there," he said. "To my shame, I never did. It was simply too painful for me. I loved my mother dearly."

I nodded my understanding. It would be a challenge, but if I had to take photos of everything, anyway, I could make certain that Mom got a chance to choose anything that could hold enduring memories of Gran. I could do this much for her, save her from the pain of going through Gran's things.

"Well, there may still be a lot of her things out there. Why don't you come out now and have a look around?"

Royal gave me a gentle smile. "If it was painful for me then to be in that old house, it would be doubly painful now. You might think me overly sentimental, Tabitha, but I just don't think my heart could take it. I haven't been back to that house in...oh...in I don't know how long."

Mary Ellen asked, "What house?"

"Mother's house."

"Oh. No, we never go there."

And I hadn't ever seen Royal and Mary Ellen out at Gran's house, not once. Not even for holidays. She'd always said that it was because they spent their Thanksgivings and their Christmases with Mary Ellen's family instead. I hadn't known that Royal had been staying away all those years because of grief.

"Well...if there's anything of your mother's that you think might still be at the house...anything you might want...just let me know, and I'll set it aside for you. I'd be glad to."

"That's very kind of you," he said.

"That reminds me. Did Great Grandma Helen come from Germany?"

"What makes you ask that?"

"I found some boxes in Gran's room. I could be wrong, but in one of them was a Bible—I'm pretty sure it's a Bible, anyway—that I think is written in German. I just wondered how it had come into the family."

"Well, now, isn't that something?" Royal grinned at me. "Mother wasn't German, but my grandmother was. Mother's mother. She came over when she was in her twenties, if I recall, but even so, she didn't speak much English as far as I can remember. Oma Scheiter. She died before your mother ever met her."

"I never knew that. Mystery solved." I returned his grin, strangely pleased by this new nugget of information about my family. "Maybe you would want the Bible—it would mean a lot more to you than it would to us."

"I'd certainly like to see it." Royal turned to Mary Ellen, rotating her plate to present her with her untouched lump of coleslaw. "Try a bite or two of this, sweetheart. You need to have something in your stomach before you take your pills."

I reached for another biscuit. They were delicious, dusted with salt and perfect with a slathering of butter. "I'll set it aside for you. The Bible, I mean."

"Thank you, Tabitha. You just found that old thing in a box, eh?"

"Yes. There were a few boxes, actually. Documents, photos, like I said, and some diaries." I tore open a packet of butter and picked up my knife.

Royal turned to look at me, his dark brows drawn together. "Diaries?"

I scooped the pat of butter out of the plastic packet with the tip of my knife. "Yeah—well, one diary, I should say, from when Gran was a little girl. The other one wasn't in the box. It's more recent. Just from this year."

Royal stared at me. I met his gaze for a moment, but he was looking at me so intently that I felt unsettled and broke eye contact, pretending to focus on smearing butter over my biscuit but really wondering why he had suddenly turned so serious.

"I'd like to have those," he said. "I'd like to have her diaries."

This took me aback. Of all the things he might have asked for, Gran's diaries were strange, a simultaneously personal and humdrum sort of thing. Did he want to read Gran's musing about painting? I hadn't read the childhood diary yet, but I imagined it was pretty much what mine had been: chatter about school, friends, and boys.

I was uncertain how to respond. "Did you want another biscuit, Aunt Mary Ellen? I just buttered one up for you."

"Oh," she said. She gestured at me vaguely with her fork. Her half-biscuit had just one small bite out of it.

Royal ignored the redirection. "You asked me what I'd like of Ruth's, and that's what I'd like. I'd like to have her diaries."

I grabbed my napkin, wiping my fingers. "I'll talk to Mom about it. I just want to make sure—"

"Has she asked for them?"

I hesitated. Then I shook my head. "No, but I think Mom might want them. They're very personal, aren't they?"

"Have you read them?"

"No, but they're—"

"They're just diaries. You know how girls are. There's nothing in them but nonsense. I loved my sister, Tabitha. I loved her for her nonsense. It would mean more to me than I can properly convey to you to have those diaries."

I didn't know what to say. I struggled for a diplomatic way to respond, a kind way to say no, or say maybe—say, essentially, that I couldn't give away something so personal without asking my mother first if she wanted to keep them.

Royal was Gran's brother. Mom was her daughter, her child. Surely that meant they should go to her?

"Please." He put his warm hand over mine. I looked down at his age-spotted skin, his knobby knuckles, his neatly trimmed, clean nails.

"Okay." I patted the back of his hand with my free one, a bit awkwardly. "Okay. I'll put them aside for you, and I'll bring them when I drop off the rest."

He seemed to want to say something else, but whatever it was, he held it back. We returned to our meals, lapsing into a silence to match Mary Ellen's.