Tacoma Standard Time

Tacoma smelled like rain that hadn't decided to fall yet. Mara had circled Edwin Okafor's address twice before she understood why the house looked wrong: no mailbox. Someone had unscrewed it from the post and never put another one up, which struck her, in her current line of work, as a specific and deliberate kind of grief.

An old man answered before she knocked, as if he'd been standing on the other side of the door for reasons of his own.

"You're too young to be a Jehovah's Witness," he said, "and too well-dressed to be selling anything. So you're here about Carol."

Mara's hand went still on the envelope. "How did you know?"

"Because you have her chin." He said it the way a man names a constellation he has looked for every night of his life and finally found. "Also because I have been expecting an envelope from that woman for forty-one years, and a person develops a sense for when a debt is finally about to be paid."

He did not invite her in right away. He stood in the doorway and looked at her the way Ruth had, except where Ruth's face had gone soft with relief, Edwin's went carefully blank, a man closing a series of doors inside himself so that only one would be open at a time.

"Forty-one years," Mara repeated. "That's before I was born."

"Yes," Edwin said. "It generally is, with these things." He stepped back at last, holding the door. "You'd better come learn about your mother before she was your mother."

The house was narrow and warm and smelled of cardamom. Through the front window, angled toward a bay Mara couldn't yet see, stood a telescope taller than she was, its brass gone soft with handling.

"You're an astronomer," she said.

"I taught physics for thirty-eight years. The telescope is what I do now that no one requires me to grade anything." He gestured her toward a chair that looked older than either of them. "Your mother gave me an interest in the sky before I owned a single lens. She said the stars made her feel forgiven for things she hadn't done yet. I did not understand her at nineteen. I understand her a great deal better now that I am seventy-eight and reading a letter forty-one years late."

He had not yet opened it. It sat on the small table between them like a held breath.

"Do you want me to go?" Mara asked. "While you read it?"

"No," Edwin said. "I have had forty-one years alone with the not-knowing. I find I would rather not be alone with the knowing too."