She was sixty-nine years old. She had her pension and her Social Security and the house paid off and a savings account that she had been told, by a young man at the bank who wore his tie loose like it was a style, was "very healthy for someone in your bracket," which she had taken as both a compliment and an insult and filed accordingly. She did not travel. She had been to Branson once with her church group and to Chicago twice for the art museum and to Lysander's cousin's wedding in Tucson in 1993, and that was the end of her catalog. She had always been the one who stayed and held things down. She had been, she understood, a woman shaped like a paperweight.
She had found the Pelican's Rest on the computer in early March. It was a stilted gray-shingled house on the sound side of Frisco, near the very bottom of Hatteras Island, where the island hooked west like a beckoning finger. It had four bedrooms and a screened porch and an outdoor shower and a crow's nest on the roof from which, the listing said, you could see both the Atlantic Ocean and the Pamlico Sound at the same time, which seemed to Gussie a reasonable description of what a vacation ought to be. Sleeps six, the listing said. Six, hard cap, the fine print said, because of the county.
And she had sat with her coffee and her mother's glasses and she had counted. Ramsay. Sunita. Zinnia. Coralie. Herself.
Five.
And then she had thought about the letter in the drawer by the stove, the one that had come in January, in the tall looping hand she had not seen on an envelope in twenty-six years, and she had booked for six.
She had not told anyone about the letter. That was the first thing she made herself admit, sitting there with the phone face down. She had not told them about the letter, and she had not told them why the number was six, and she had planned to tell them in her own time, at the beach, in the crow's nest maybe, with the two waters on either side, in the way she had planned it in her head every night for three months. She had been keeping a secret too.
But she had not left anybody behind in Ohio.
She turned the phone over and called her son.
Ramsay picked up on the fifth ring, which was one ring later than Ramsay ever picked up for his mother, because Ramsay was the kind of son who answered on the second ring and said "What's wrong?" before hello.
"Hey, Mom." His voice was too bright. Behind it there was wind, a big, soft, roaring kind of wind, and something that might have been a screen door.
"Where are you, honey?"
"I'm at the warehouse," Ramsay said. "Saturday inventory. You know how it is. Can I call you back? We're in the middle of a count."
Gussie closed her eyes. Her son had been a terrible liar at six and a terrible liar at sixteen, and he was, she was relieved to find, still a terrible liar at forty-four. Some things you could count on.