When we finally reached the freeway, it was choked with cars heading toward the city, and we both closed the windows. When we got back to my parked car, Lorraine said she’d give me a few days to journal and then she’d check in.

“They don’t get easier, is the problem,” she said.

“I wouldn’t expect them to.”

“Good.”

I realized I was still holding Daphne’s letters when Lorraine drove away.

THE BEST TIME TO GO to a bar is right when it opens. Around 5:00 p.m. They’re usually mostly empty, and you can be nearly alone to drink for at least an hour before happy-hour people start to arrive. You also always look like you’re waiting for someone, so no one can ever really accuse you of having a problem.

There are those kinds of bars, and then there are the kinds of bars that open at 6:00 a.m. and close at 2:00 a.m., leaving approximately four hours for the casual alcoholic to have to go find somewhere else to sit. I had spent the better part of my twenties in the latter, but they didn’t have the same kind of pull anymore.

Still, I found myself parking in front of one such bar, the beckoning yellow sign weak now. The door was heavy and the interior was just as I remembered it: dark like a tomb and thick with the smell of decades of stale beer. The light from outside always jarred alert whoever was hovering over their drink at the bar. Several men turned to look at me briefly and then went back to nursing. I looked through my wallet and found twenty-six dollars. I asked for tequila neat and knew I could stretch my money to cover three drinks if I asked for well liquor.

I took a seat in a vinyl booth closest to the jukebox, so I could get some light from the glow, and opened the first of Daphne’s letters.

To her mother, Daphne kept things short, shorter than what I would have written to my own mother. Mostly memories of summers at the beach near Santa Monica Pier, a genuine thank-you for letting her stay out past curfew on summer nights to stroll along the beach and boardwalk with her boyfriend. She recounted that first flush of excitement as they walked along the cliffs in the Palisades and spied the lights of the pier glittering in a line against the dark water. How she clutched her boyfriend’s hand in joy and had never forgotten that warmth, the coarseness of his fingers and palms from working with horses in the Santa Monica Mountains. How they lost touch when she went to college, but she never forgot him or that summer. She thanked her mother for letting her become a woman with ease, despite her father’s desire that she stay a good and moral girl.