“This is perfect, actually,” Eric was saying over the roar. “Perfect timing.”

“Thanks for your concern.”

“No, really,” he said. He explained things slowly, savoring the story like a person talking himself into something.

In July, a large brown envelope had come in the mail for him. Inside, Eric found a long, handwritten letter rubber-banded atop a thick stack of papers—the deed to a seaside Florida motel his great-aunt Frances closed down years ago.

Eric began to read from his aunt’s letter, in a quavering drawl: “I always thought the property could be used for something more creative than a place for beach bums to watch television, which was all the imagination my late husband could muster. I’m too old to take this on, but I can finance it.”

“Don’t do the voice, Eric. The voice is weird.”

He continued: “It would bring me the greatest pleasure to help my nephews begin what I’m sure would be a successful and personally rewarding business venture. She wants us to start a school, Marianne. A school for writing.”

“Well, congratulations,” Marianne said, peering again at the letter in her own hands. “I don’t see how you turn a motel into a school, or what any of this has to do with my situation. Or, for that matter, how you and your brother will possibly run a school together.”

Eric’s brother, Mark, was an investment banker who’d moved from Charlotte to an apartment downtown, just a few blocks from Ground Zero. Marianne had met him exactly once, at a trader’s bar with bras hanging from the ceiling.

“That’s the thing, he’s just helping with the business side. I told Frances I need help, obviously—teachers and an administrator to start off—and she’s willing to invest.” He paused. “She’s willing to pay your salary. To run it.”

“My salary? To run a school?”

“There are some details we have to work out—she wants it to be a place for Christian writers, but that’s perfect, isn’t it? It’s what we always talked about.”

“Eric, it’s what we always joked about. There’s a difference.”

“I told her that you had this exact same idea years ago,” he said. “That’s why she wants you to be the administrator. The director.”

This was the business they’d imagined together in grad school, after too many scotches for Eric and too many mojitos for Marianne: a low-residency master of fine arts program for evangelical Christians.