Venita loved your letter you wrote her. She never got mail before and she always wanted some. Yours was all the mail she ever got. Venita told me about you. She thought you would come again.

I wanted my Venita to finish school and go from here, go to a good place. But life didn’t let her run anywhere.

All sun and laughing, all friends and hope, taken from her on a sidewalk. She’s done running.

She liked your true colors. I always tell my grandchildren, you look for people’s true colors. Doesn’t matter about the color. Just the true.

So you be true, and you run for Venita. Use that life you have.

With love from Venita’s grandmother,
Dorothy Edna Loomis

Aus was so glad to see Macey.

He had forgotten the shortness of her hair. He had expected to see the old ponytail bobbing. Only five days’ separation and he had already forgotten things. It made him queasy. What had his parents forgotten about him, and what had he forgotten about them? It was months since they’d lived together.

Macey had bought scarves for Lindsay and Grace and a San Francisco cap for him. Aus put on the San Francisco cap just to be polite, because if he were going to post any town on his head, it would be Chicago, but then Macey put a matching cap on her fringe of hair, and he laughed, and they tapped bills.

“How was San Francisco?” he said. He’d been there twice, so he knew how it was. It was wonderful. It was a great town. But Macey said, “Venita’s grandmother answered my letter.” She held it out, so he had to set his books on the floor in order to take it and read it.

The letter was both bleak and kind. He said lightly, “Her first name sounds like an old person’s, doesn’t it? Dorothy Edna. You can tell she’s the same generation as my grandmother Monica and your grandmother Leandra.”

Macey gave Aus the look his mother directed so often at Dad: the old you’ve-let-me-down look. “I like the part about true colors,” he said quickly.

They had no classes together. Bells were ringing. They had no time together, either. He said, “I’ll be walking home,” and Mace nodded.

He took the cap off, because they weren’t allowed in classrooms, but he held the fabric between his fingers, thinking of Macey going from one cap design to another and finally settling on this one.

He and Mace would walk to Shell Beach together, because they were both going to their grandparents’. By the time biology class was over, Aus had decided against the shortcuts. He was not in the mood to squeeze between the strands of barbed wire.