“I’m going to mine every last one of Mama’s answers out of this pink clamshell if it’s the last thing I do,” she adds, and Ems, grinning, toasts her with her AP. She’s four years older than Tai, but that hasn’t stopped Tai from being someone’s Queen Tee before. It all started with Dad, a good forty-some years older, after all, whose greatest joy was Tai.

Marion received a box in the mail for Tai from an old secretary of Dad’s. In it, there was a note reading, Some dopey new exec took the office, so we had to pack it up. I thought you should have his only personal effect. Sending you my love. The personal effect was a photo of baby Tai on Dad’s lap, both of them holding a finger to their right temples and smiling wider than I’ve ever seen.

I know, now, that I can’t blame Dad for our family fracturing, nor Mama, nor Teddy, nor Tai. Life tore us apart, as it does many families, and not everyone is granted the chance to come back together in time. It would be easy, so easy, to hate each of them, and to focus on everything they failed to share with us. But when I think of Dad’s impassioned, flawed letter to us—the letter that started this entire process, the letter also admitting he was wrong, I see an extended hand, from the same man who seemed so hesitant to connect with us as children.

“How are you feeling today, Tai?” the Pocket Girlfriend asks. “It’s an overcast day, but there’s beauty in that! Beauty isn’t what is beautiful. It’s what pleases us!”

Tai jolts, taking my wrist in her hand. “Did you hear that?”

I nod, and for a fleeting moment, we feel her there with us; as if time is a split river, and the past has flowed back into our near-future.

“Do I please you?” the Pocket Girlfriend asks, breaking the spell.

“She’s such a little h-e-a-u-x,” Tai replies, and I swat her shoulder.

Before the dinner rush, there’s a knock on the door of the deli, and Ems returns with an unstamped manila envelope, the typed address sticker made out to T and M. Where the return address should be, there are only three diagonal lines.

We open it together.

On the following page are notes written in a familiar hand, the uneven writing on the letters sent to Mama by Brando.

White Fox is loosely based on the legend Mireille used to tell—the wild fox saved on a moor, who becomes a beautiful human wife for a short while, before reverting to her true fox form, etcetera.

Our hands start to shake.