The next morning she noticed that the Mercedes’s silver paint was dusty, coated with a smoggy road film. She started it and it clattered and stank in the closed-in parking area. On her way to the bank she wondered how long twenty years lasted. The following evening, she sat down to write a letter to her mother, tearing up five different beginning pages. She called Paul and asked him how to begin.

“This is the first real letter home and it’ll be a long one,” she told him. “You write someone back home every day. How do I start?”

“Well, first there’s the inside address.”

“Come on.”

“Just do it like a phone call. Like when you call home.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Colette, why are you writing, anyway?”

“I feel enough distance. I can bear to write to them.” She put a palm up to her eyes. “And I know what you’re thinking. They’re the ones doing the bearing, right?”

“Damn straight.”

“You know what’s hardest, though? Reading their letters and finding not one shred of meanness, anything that would cause me pain. Nothing between the lines.” She grabbed a handful of her hair and gathered it into a fist. “I’ve got to be grateful for that.”

“Tell them that in your letter. You know, how much you enjoy what they tell you.”

“What?”

“Maybe they think you left because they weren’t good enough.”

“I don’t want to hear you say that again. You can’t make me feel guilty.”

There was a long breath on the other end of the line. “Other people can’t make you feel guilty.”

Colette bit her lip for a long time. “How do I start this thing?”

“How about ‘I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner’?”

“There you go again.”

“Well, say what you want, then. Tell them you’re not sorry one damn bit you haven’t made them happy with a letter.”

“You don’t have to be mean.”

“Okay. I’ll try. Just tell them how busy you’ve been, then explain what that means. The news will come out while you’re trying to give it. You going to tell them about us?”

She made a face. “Us,” she said, “is still under construction.”

“Later,” he said, hanging up.

She fixed herself a pot of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table to stare at the little tablet on which she had written an address and salutation. “I’m sorry…” she began.

Chapter Nine

Nine

Early in May Paul was reading the Los Angeles Times and saw an ad for reduced airfares to New Orleans. He bought a ticket over the phone and then for the first time in his life flew on an airplane. From a window seat of the DC-9, he regarded the thrumming engines with great suspicion. His father met him and took him to Tiger Island.