Gussie put her free hand flat on the bedspread, rules or no rules. She felt it under her palm, the pilled synthetic, the faint grit.
So there it was. Another photograph. Her children had not just moved her. One of them had spoken for her, had put words in her mouth, words she had in fact said once, twenty-two years ago, in a kitchen, in a fury, and had never revised. Coralie had not invented them. She had only dated them wrong.
"Grandma? Are you mad?"
"I'm not mad at you," Gussie said. "I want you to hear that. You did the right thing calling me. You did the brave thing. It's very hard to be the only person in a family telling the truth. Ask anybody."
"Are you going to call Dad?"
"No," Gussie said. "I'm not going to call anybody. I want you to do something for me."
"Okay."
"I want you to go back downstairs and go to bed. And I want you to not say anything to anybody about this call. Not because it's a secret. Because I'd like to say it myself, in person. Can you do that?"
"In person?" Zinnia's whisper went up a half step. "Grandma. Where are you?"
"Emporia, Virginia," said Gussie Bennet. "There's a water stain on the ceiling that looks like Florida. Go to bed, sweetheart. Look at the boats one more minute first."
She was on the road again by six. She crossed into North Carolina with the sun coming up on her left and the fields flat and green and full of something she guessed was tobacco or soybeans and could not have proved either way, and somewhere past Elizabeth City the land began to get lower and wetter and the sky got bigger, so much bigger that she leaned forward over the steering wheel to look at it. Then there was the long bridge over Currituck Sound, and the strip of Nags Head with its pancake houses and putt-putt courses and kite shops, and then, south of Whalebone Junction, everything simply stopped. The houses stopped. The signs stopped. There was a road, and on both sides of the road there were dunes with grass on them, combed by the wind, and beyond the dunes on the left there was a brightness that was the Atlantic Ocean, and beyond the marsh on the right there was a different, softer brightness that was the sound, and Gussie Bennet, sixty-nine years old, a retired claims adjuster from Kettering, Ohio, pulled the Buick over onto the sandy shoulder of Highway 12 and turned off the engine and cried for about four minutes.
Then she blew her nose, checked her face in the rearview mirror, put on the sun hat that made her look like a woman who solves murders in Provence, and drove the rest of the way.
Searcy Shoreline Rentals was in a low cedar-shake building in Frisco next to a tackle shop and a place that sold shaved ice in forty flavors. Inside it was cool and smelled like sunscreen and printer toner, and a woman in her fifties with a gray braid down her back and reading glasses pushed up on her head came around the counter before the door had finished jingling.