Free Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry by Susan Vaught Page B

this page?” Indri asked.
    â€œLooks like a copy of Mississippi’s Declaration of Secession and a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. She didn’t write anything on them. Maybe they’re just for reference.”
    Indri’s gaze moved over each entry on the time line, until she got to the bottom. “What are the Black Codes?”
    â€œNo idea. And what do you think this means?” I showed her a bracket drawn near the Black Codes entry that extended onto the second page full of dates and events. Outside the bracket was a bunch of numbers, written in a straight line:
    â€œ1882-1968 42+539=581”
    And under that, a name, underlined a bunch of times.
    â€œFred???”
    â€œWhy was she doing math in the margins?” Indri asked. “And who is Fred?”
    â€œThese first numbers must be dates, 1882–1968. But the math?” I shrugged. “Fred might mean Fred Harper.”
    â€œThe goofy old history professor who does the coathook gag?”
    â€œYeah. Grandma and Dr. Harper worked on other books together. They were good friends, I think—um, without all the fighting and never speaking to each other again part.”
    Indri scratched her chin, leaving a blotch of red pastel dead center. “Do you think the numbers are important?”
    â€œI don’t know what’s important and what isn’t,” I admitted as I laid page five down on the stack and spread my fingers to hold it in place. My insides sank as I realized Grandma might have already been turning into a ghost when she did this. The numbers might be some big deal, or she might have been distracted by me talking about my math homework the night she was making her notes. Who knew?
    â€œShe might not have gotten to the end of this,” I admitted. “And I know we just agreed to follow her rules, but . . .”
    â€œNobody made any promises,” Indri said with something like confidence. “Well, just an implied promise, maybe.”
    I moved my hand, then carefully shifted the papers that we had read through to the bottom of the stack. More time line appeared, a lot of stuff about civil rights in Mississippi. We looked at the next page, and the next.
    â€œMore time line,” Indri murmured.
    Another page. And another. Time line. Dates. Who got lynched and when and where and what was known about why. Who was shot and killed for their work for civil rights. When major events happened. Some years in the 1960s took ten or twelve pages to list everything important. But nowhere in there did we find one bit of information about what Grandma and Avadelle fought about.
    Around 1968, we ran into trouble.
    â€œWhat does, ‘Putting the garfle in the window’ mean?” Indri pointed at the strange sentence mixed into Grandma’s typing between “April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated in Memphis,” and “Approximately 1,500 people marched in Hattiesburg four days after his death.”
    â€œI have no idea,” I said. The next line read, “April 11, 1968: President June signs Civil Rights Act of 1968.”
    Indri and I looked at each other. President June should have been President Johnson . Grandma never would have made such a mistake. Her writing got worse and worse after that. More and more words were wrong, or spelled incorrectly. She crossed through a lot of things and tried to add notes, but those trailed off too. Sometimes, she just wrote, “I love you, my little Oops.” Other times, sentences seemed like total gibberish.
    â€œThis doesn’t make any sense now,” I said. “She must have gotten too sick too fast to finish.”
    â€œI can’t believe it.” Indri banged her hand on the picnic table.
    I flipped back and forth through the pages of Grandma’swriting, sadness expanding in my chest, heavy and bitter. I went all the way to the last pages, still just hoping—but there was nothing