Denise wanted to call a lawyer. Her son-in-law wanted to call the news. Her pastor called to pray with her. Three television stations left messages. Vivian let them all go to voicemail, and on the third day she put on her gardening gloves and went out back and pulled weeds out of the tomato beds for four hours in the heat, until her knees ached and her mind was quiet.
On the fourth day Ruth Kessler called.
"I'm not calling for the company," Ruth said. "I want to be clear about that. Corporate would like very much to send you a letter on nice paper. I've told them I'll quit if they do. I'm calling to tell you two things, and then I'll leave you alone if you want me to."
"Go on," said Vivian.
"The first is that as of Monday, no salesperson in any Whitcomb and Hale store in the country is permitted to leave a client alone with an open piece. Not for a phone call, not for anything. If they have to step away, the piece goes back in the case first. It's a rule that should have existed a long time ago. It protects the stock, but that's not why I fought for it. It means nobody will ever again be left standing alone at a counter waiting to be accused of something. And every employee in the company is going through training this fall. Real training, not a video. I'm running the Chicago sessions myself. I'm going to tell them about the girl in the yellow dress. And I'm going to tell them about you, if you'll let me."
Vivian was quiet for a moment. "And the second thing?"
"The second thing is that Grant Mercer wrote you a letter. By hand. He brought it to the store yesterday and asked me to get it to you. I told him I'd ask you first. I haven't read it. You don't have to either. I can shred it. But I promised him I'd ask."
Vivian looked out her kitchen window at the tomato plants, staked up neat and green in the afternoon sun.
"Send it," she said.
The letter came in a plain envelope, forwarded inside a larger one with the Whitcomb and Hale crest on the corner. It was three pages long, written in blue ink on lined paper torn from a legal pad, and the handwriting got worse as it went on, as though the writer had pressed harder and harder.
Mrs. Reed, it began. I don't know how to start this, so I'm going to start with what I said to you in that room, because it's the only honest thing I said all day. You asked me if you looked like you belonged there when you walked in, and I said no. I want you to know I've thought about that answer every hour since. I've tried to figure out where it came from. I don't have a good explanation. I have a lot of bad ones.