"He sends postcards," Delia said. "Santa Fe. Marrakech. Places I have to look up." She flipped a burger with more force than necessary. "That's his way of visiting."
"Do you miss him?"
Delia was quiet so long Wren thought she wouldn't answer. "Like a limb," she said at last. "You go on. You just — you go on."
In her senior year, Wren won the state scholarship essay contest. The prompt was Someone Who Changed My Life. She wrote about a rainy morning, a tower of coins, and a woman who'd been docked forty dollars for feeding a hungry child. She titled it "The Woman Who Fed Me." Afterward, Delia hugged Wren so hard the girl's ribs ached.
She'd written it in one sitting at the Webbs' kitchen table, crying most of the way through, and Dana had read the draft with her hand over her mouth and said, "Oh, baby," and Marcus had read it and gone very quiet, and then hugged Wren hard enough to lift her off her feet. "You send that," he'd said, gruff. "You send that exactly as it is."
The scholarship covered tuition and then some. At the awards dinner, when they called her name, Wren walked to the podium past tables of strangers and read the forty dollars part without flinching, and in the back, Delia cried into a paper napkin the way she did everything — without making a fuss, like grief and joy were just weather.
"You wrote that beautiful," Delia whispered. "You go be somebody, sweet girl. And remember —"
"I know," Wren said, laughing through tears. "Pass the plate along."
The Webbs drove her to the university in August, the car packed to the roof. Dana cried. Marcus pretended not to. At the dorm curb, Wren hugged them both and promised to call every Sunday, and she meant it.
She didn't know, standing on that curb with her whole life ahead of her, that it would be twenty years before she drove back down Main Street in Halloway. She didn't know about the recession coming, or Mabel Bell's funeral, or the letter of intent, or any of it. She knew she was going to be an architect, and she was going to build beautiful things, and she was going to come back soon.
For a while, she did come back — Thanksgivings at the Webbs', where Dana still packed her a lunch for the drive with a note, and Marcus still made her change the rental car's tire "for practice." Summers working the Bluebird's Saturday rush. Christmas Eve at Delia's bungalow, the wind chimes singing, Delia's mother's pie on the table, Tommy's postcards lined up on the mantel like small windows.
One Thanksgiving, Wren brought a boyfriend — a earnest grad student named Peter who asked Delia about her "process" and got a look that could've frozen gravy. After he left, Delia said, "He's nice," in the tone of a woman describing wallpaper. Wren laughed until she cried. "He's not the one, is he," Delia said. It wasn't a question. She was right.
Then came the internship in Chicago, twelve-hour days, the job offer she couldn't refuse, the master's program, the firm. The visits thinned to holidays, then to phone calls, then to Christmas cards with photos — the dorm, the drafting studio, graduation in the black gown. Delia kept every one in the shoebox and told Elena, when Elena asked, "That girl's out being somebody. That's what I told her to do."
Somewhere around 2016, the cards stopped. Not from unkindness — from the particular acceleration of a life taking off, the fund, the first properties, the trade press. Wren always meant to write. She always meant to visit. She kept meaning, the way you keep meaning to fix a screen door, until one Tuesday the meaning ran out.
Soon took twenty years.
Chapter 6
Leaving Halloway
The morning Wren left for the university, Delia was at the Bluebird by five, though her shift didn't start till six. She made a pie — apple, lattice top, the recipe her mother had written on an index card in pencil — and set it in a box with a note: For the dorm. Share it or don't. — D.
Silas was waiting at the bus stop with a flat package wrapped in brown paper. "Our deal," he said, and pressed it into Wren's hands. Inside was the photograph, matted and framed: the girl, the plate, Delia's hand, the steam. Wren stared at it until her vision blurred.
"I'll come back," she said fiercely. "All the time. Every holiday."
Silas smiled the smile of a man who had watched a thousand young people leave towns. "You'll come back when you can. That's enough."
The bus pulled out past the lake, the water flat and silver. Wren watched Halloway shrink in the window — the water tower, the church steeple, the Bluebird's little blue awning — and she felt the particular ache of leaving a place that had finally started to feel like hers. The framed photograph rode on her knees. The napkin — Delia's napkin, soft as cloth now — was in her wallet.
The Webbs' goodbye at the dorm curb lasted an hour and felt like a minute. Dana cried and pretended she wasn't. Marcus pretended he wasn't and was. They helped her carry the boxes up three flights, made the bed with the sheets Dana had packed, and stood in the doorway of the small room looking the way parents look when the job is done and the missing starts.
"Call Sundays," Dana said.
"Every Sunday," Wren promised, and she meant it, and for years she kept it.
The Sunday calls split three ways: the Webbs first, then Delia, on the kitchen phone with the long cord. Delia would put the kettle on — Wren could hear it — and ask about studio, and Wren would describe her models, and Delia would say things like, "Load-bearing walls. Like a good marriage — you need to know what's holding what up." Wren wrote that one down.
Delia mailed her a shoebox that October — snickerdoodles, a bag of the diner’s coffee, and a note: “Eat. Study. Call Sundays. — D.” Wren’s roommates devoured the cookies in a night and declared Delia a saint. “She’s better than a saint,” Wren said, fiercely loyal. “Saints don’t make pie.” She taped the note inside her desk drawer, next to the photograph, where it stayed all four years.