Static and Distance

The next three letters went the way letters sometimes go: quietly, competently, without much left over to write down.

A dentist in Cheyenne who barely remembered Carol's name but was touched regardless. A woman in Fort Collins who read the letter, said "well, that explains the fruitcake," and left it at that. A man in Laramie who wasn't home, whose neighbor promised to hold onto it, which Mara had learned by now meant something between fifty and ninety percent that it would happen.

She was learning the math of forgiveness the way she'd once learned the math of medication schedules: never as clean as a chart wants you to believe, always more human than the paperwork allows for.

Her phone rang somewhere past Laramie, and she almost didn't answer it, because it was a Tacoma number and her chest did an unhelpful thing at the sight of it.

"I found something," Julian said, no hello, the specific enthusiasm of someone who has been sitting on information for exactly as long as manners required. "You said Peg mentioned a bus. And your dad said Larkspur, Minnesota, right? That's a real small town. Small towns keep newspapers on microfilm forever because nothing else ever happens to write about."

"You didn't have to do that."

"I know. I wanted to." A pause, the kind that has a whole conversation folded up inside it. "Also I may have told my grandfather I was doing homework for six hours, and he did not believe me, and made me promise to tell him everything eventually, so. Just so you know your business is now international news in one house in Tacoma."

Mara laughed, actually laughed, for what felt like the first time since the shoebox. "What did you find?"

"Nothing I want to tell you while you're driving," Julian said, and something in his voice had gone careful in a way that made her hands tighten on the wheel before he'd said another word. "Find somewhere to stop. I'll call you back in twenty minutes."