They ate at wonderful restaurants, food so different from what Nana and Papa prepared that Macey wondered if her grandparents were watching the right TV chefs after all. They sailed in the bay, which might be even more beautiful than Macey’s own, for it had a huge great stretch of sky and long views to distant hills spackled with joyful buildings.
After locating wooden stairs that catapulted down Telegraph Hill among houses so romantic that Macey wanted to buy each one, they hit a bookstore so Dad could read up on the San Francisco earthquake. Macey wandered around looking for something to read. She passed a rack of classics—Thoreau and Robert Louis Stevenson and Shakespeare. King Lear, Richard III—and Hamlet.
Macey had written to Venita’s grandmother, Mrs. Loomis. It had taken hours to figure out why she was writing at all, let alone decide what to say.
In her first version, Macey wrote about Venita quoting Hamlet and the chilling comparison between Hamlet’s world and hers. But Macey ended up writing elementary-school sentences like “I thought we could be friends” and “I liked painting with her.” She mailed the letter, and if anything ever felt like tossing a note in a bottle into the ocean of life, this was it.
“Find anything?” said Dad.
Macey wrenched her eyes from Hamlet and her mind from Venita. This trip was a strategy. Her parents did not want her thinking about Good Shepherd. “I guess not.”
That afternoon into the sparkling city came fog, so raw her bones were cold. She hadn’t brought Austin’s UConn cap with her, for fear of losing it, so she bought a souvenir San Francisco cap to cover her freezing skull. Then she bought another, to give Aus. They’d have matching caps. Whether Aus would wear it, thus revealing that he and Macey had a link, she did not know.
They got home Wednesday night, and she’d missed three days of school. The Clares had a huge mailbox that could hold several days’ mail, so they hadn’t asked Nana and Papa to pick it up. Besides, Mom and Dad hated to ask Nana and Papa for anything. Macey was the one to bring in the mail. She flipped it in piles: bills, catalogs, magazines, credit card offers. There wouldn’t be personal mail, because Mom and Dad used e-mail, and nobody was out there to write to Macey.
A small square envelope with her name and address written in lovely, old-fashioned penmanship appeared in the pile.
“Hey, Mace, anything good?” said Dad, coming up behind her.
“Nope.”
“What are you hiding, then? A love letter from Austin?” He grinned like a puppy, thinking he knew what she held, and she didn’t correct him but went upstairs to her room to read the letter.
Dear Macey,