It was a thin airmail envelope, pale blue, with red and blue chevrons around the edges, gone soft and creased with age. It had never been opened. Across the front, in a round, slanted, girlish hand that he had seen not twenty minutes ago on the back of a recipe card, it said: *Wes C., Juniper, Merritt Falls, Connecticut, U.S.A.* There was a French stamp in the corner with a picture of a woman in a Phrygian cap, and a postmark, smeared: PARIS, 2 MAI 1974. And on the back flap, in the same hand: *D. Hart, Foyer International, 93 bd St-Michel, Paris 5e.*
"Mr. Dombrowski brought it to the door," his mother said quietly. "He had the route then. He said, Barbara, I think this is for your boy, there's no other Wes on Juniper. I put it in a new envelope and sent it on to the American Express in Amsterdam, like you told me to in your postcard. And six weeks later it came back to me, stamped unclaimed. You'd gone on to Copenhagen by then, I suppose. And then in August you came home, so thin, with your hair down to your shoulders, and you were here for nine days before you went up to Vermont with that fiddle person, and I meant to give it to you. I had it right there on the hall table. And then you were gone, and I put it in this box to send on, and I kept thinking, I'll send it next week, and then it had been a month, and then it had been a year, and it seemed too late. It seemed like it would only hurt. And then your father got sick." She stopped. She pressed her lips together. "That's not an excuse. I'm ashamed of it, Wesley. I truly am. I took it out a hundred times. I used to wonder about her. This girl in Paris who had written to my son with no proper address and somehow found him anyway. D. Hart. I used to make up stories about who she might be."
Wes stared at the envelope.
"And then on Wednesday night," said his mother, "you called me from some bar with the jukebox going, and you said, Ma, her name is Delia Hart. And I had to sit down on the stairs."
"That's why you said *Hart* like that."
"That's why I said *Hart* like that." His mother's eyes were wet, but she was smiling. "I knew who she was before she got out of the car, sweetheart. I knew it the minute she came up the walk with that pie. And then she sat at my table and said, a laundromat, in Paris, and I thought, well, there it is. There it is. It's been sitting in my closet for three and a half years, and it's walked right up the front walk on its own two feet." She pushed the blue envelope across the tablecloth until it lay beside the laundry ticket and the green velvet box. "I don't think she knew that you didn't know. Not at first. I think she thought you'd brought her here because you remembered. And then she sat there telling you the whole story, and you looked at her like she was a stranger reading a menu, and I watched her face, Wesley. I watched her realize."
Wes put both hands flat on the table. He thought he might be going to be sick, or cry, or both.
"Open it," said his mother. "It's yours. It always was."
He opened it.