Leaves of Hope by Catherine Palmer

had on school holidays when she was younger.
    Jan padded in her thick socks to the coffeemaker. She would get the pot started, and then she could run to the bathroom for a quick shower. This was going to be a better day, she thought as she stood at the sink to fill the glass carafe with water. She and Beth would start off on the right foot, and that way Jan could head off any…
    She stared at her empty driveway. The rental car was gone.

Chapter Four
    “I’ m looking for yearbooks.” Beth leaned against the reference counter. “From John Tyler High School.”
    The librarian was a nice-looking young man with dimples. “The Alcalde! Are you an alum?”
    No one in New York would have asked such a personal question. In large cities the world over, Beth had discovered, people got down to business. Chitchat took too long, didn’t really matter, and you’d never see the person again, so why bother?
    With a fair amount of chagrin, she recalled her first week in the Big Apple. She had walked into a perfume boutique, said hello to a saleswoman and—like a good Southern girl—she began with a comment about the weather and then moved on to discuss her own favorite fragrances, how she enjoyed floral scents because she was from a town in Texas where roses were grown for export, how she had just arrived in New York and was excited to have found a studio apartment she could afford and on and on. Finally, Beth had realized the woman was staring at her as though she had just landed from Jupiter. Not only had Beth breached the “no small talk” rule, but her Texas twang had no doubt branded her as someone who just fell off the turnip truck.
    This wasn’t New York or London or Toronto, though, so Beth smiled back at the young librarian. “Yep, I graduated from JT a few years back. Go, Lions!”
    He laughed. “I went to Robert E. Lee High. I’m working on my library science degree at UT-Tyler now. It’s a good school, but I’ll be glad when I’ve got my degree and can move away. Tyler. ” He rolled his eyes. “My ancestors were some of the town’s first settlers, and we’ve been here ever since.”
    Beth nodded. “Time to set forth into the world. I live in New York.”
    “Really? Wow. I bet that’s different.”
    “You can say that again.” Beth reflected for a moment on the number of old families still living in the area. “Did you ever hear of anyone named Wood around here?”
    “Wood? Like Wood’s Nursery and Greenhouse? Wood’s Landscaping? Wood Tractor and Lawn Service? There are several businesses by that name.”
    For some reason this shocked Beth. Of course she knew about the Wood family. The name was on any number of small enterprises around the city. She could have been living among her relatives all her life and not realized it.
    Had they known about Beth? Was her heritage a Tyler secret? Did people elbow each other as she went by…? There’s Thomas Wood’s daughter, but don’t let on that you know….
    “I’m looking for someone,” she told the young man. “His name is Thomas Wood. Or was. I think he might have passed away a while back. I’m pretty sure he would have graduated from John Tyler High in the early eighties.”
    “All our copies of the Alcalde are down that row of reference books across from the soda machine. You can’t check the yearbooks out, but you can use our copier if you need certain pages. Dime a page.”
    Beth thanked him and headed across the library. As she crossed the reading area, she glanced at an elderly man browsing the Dallas Morning News. Did he know? If she walked up to him and said, “I’m Thomas Wood’s daughter,” would he reply, “Oh, I know that. He left town, but your mother stayed here and married John Lowell.”
    Why not? In a city of around ninety thousand, people ran into each other now and then. They joined things together—churches, PTAs, Lions and Rotary Clubs. They congregated at the Tyler Municipal Rose Garden or the Caldwell Zoo. They