On the back, in blue ballpoint, in handwriting he had been looking at in the mirror of his own life for twenty-nine years, someone had written. The ink had bled and feathered in the wash until most of it was a pale blue cloud, but some of it had survived. *Wes C.* That was clear. Then a smear. Then *Juniper*, and another smear, and *Merritt F*, and the rest of the line dissolved into a blue blur like a bruise. And underneath, smaller, squeezed in along the bottom edge: *my mother forwards everything.*
Wes stood in the front hall of his mother's house with a pink laundry ticket in his hand and the snowlight pouring in through the fanlight over the door, and the thing that had been stirring in his memory since last night sat up, and turned around, and showed him its face.
A girl in a yellow raincoat. Hair cut short as a boy's, dark brown, almost black, with a cowlick at the crown. Enormous tortoiseshell glasses that kept sliding down her nose. A battered paperback in her lap with a French-English dictionary balanced on top of it. Rain hammering on the plate glass of the laverie and the machines grinding and the smell of hot lint and wet wool. Himself in a raincoat and red swimming trunks, barefoot on the cold tile, mortified, hitting the dryer with the heel of his hand. A small hand holding out a coin. *Tiens.* A song played to a stranger while his clothes went round. *It needs a bridge,* she'd said, pushing her glasses up. *Everything else is fine, but it needs a bridge. You can't just go from the sad part straight back to the beginning. Something has to happen in between.* And afterward, out on the wet pavement, the clothes warm in his rucksack, him tearing a corner off nothing, finding nothing, borrowing her laundry ticket and writing his mother's address on the back because he had no address of his own, and pressing it into her palm. *Write to me. Seriously. My mother forwards everything.* And she had said she would. And he had walked up the hill in the rain toward the white church, sure of it.
She had not written. He had waited at the American Express office in Amsterdam, and in Copenhagen, and in Hamburg, and no letter had come, and eventually he had decided that she had not meant it, that it had been a nice afternoon and nothing more, and he had packed her away somewhere so deep he had not even known he still had her. He had not remembered her name. He was not sure, standing there, that she had ever told it to him. He had called her, in his head, all that summer, *the girl with the franc.*
He went out the front door without his coat.
She was on the porch, in her cream coat over the burgundy dress, with the green velvet box still in her hand. She had not waited for her gloves. She had known, then. She had known exactly what he would find. Her face, when she turned and saw him with the pink ticket held up between his fingers, went very still.
"You," Wes said.
"Me," said Delia.
"The laverie. The yellow raincoat. The glasses. That was you."