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By Root 1619 0

called (he was her ex-husband now). He was still trying to track down the safe-deposit box where his mother had placed her jewelry. Quite a lot of old pieces were there; there were a few diamonds and some good jade. His mother was old; he didn’t want to disturb her, or make her think of dying, and he was embarrassed to let her know he’d misplaced her instructions. She said she would look for the paper and call him back, and he asked if he could come and look with her. She said that would be all right. He came that night, and she offered him a beer. They looked through her file and found nothing. “The paper has to be somewhere,” he said, full of professional assurance. “It has to be somewhere.” She gestured hopelessly at the rooms of the house; it wasn’t in the bathroom or the kitchen or the living room, and it certainly wasn’t in Sam’s room. He asked how Sam was doing, and she told him she hadn’t heard from him. Every day she expected some word from him, but none had come. She didn’t tell him that—just that she hadn’t heard. She drank several beers, as she did every night. They sat together in the living room, drinking beer. She asked if he would like something to eat, and fixed sandwiches. He said he would go, so she could get up in the morning. She gestured at the rooms of the house. He stayed, and slept in her bed.

In the morning, Ellen called the school and said she had a cold. “Everybody is sick,” the switchboard operator told her. “It’s the change in the weather.” She and her husband took a drive and went to a nice restaurant for lunch. After lunch, they went to his house and hunted for the paper. They couldn’t find it. He fixed her dinner, and she stayed at his house that night. In the morning, he dropped her off at school on his way to work.

A girl in Junior Chorus came up to talk to her after class. Shyly, the girl told her she played the piano. Could she also play the piano for the chorus sometime? Alison played very well, the girl said quickly; she didn’t want Alison to stop playing, but could she try sometime, too? She could read music well, and she knew some classics and some Gilbert and Sullivan and a lot of popular songs, too. She mentioned some of them. Ellen watched the girl leave, blushing with nervousness at having spoken to the teacher and proud that she would be allowed to play the piano at the next meeting. She was a tall girl, with brown hair that had been cut too short; her glasses, which were harlequin-shape, looked more like something the girl’s mother would wear. Ellen wondered if Sam had a girlfriend. If the girlfriend had brown hair, did it get tangled in the wind on the motorcycle? Sam would have been proud of her—the way she put the new pianist at ease, feigning interest in the girl’s talent, thanking her for volunteering. The next afternoon, she thought of Sam again. He would have found it funny that the brown-haired girl also chose to play “Swanee River.”

Her husband came to her house after work, and they had dinner. She had a postcard from Sam. She showed it to him—a picture of the Santa Monica Freeway, clogged with cars. The message read, “The small speck between the red and the yellow car is me, doing 110. Love, Sam.” There were no specks between cars, which were themselves only specks in the picture, but Ellen looked and smiled anyway.

The next week there was another postcard—a scowling Indian—which had been mailed to her husband. Sam thanked him for the talk they had before he left. He closed with some advice: “Come West. It’s warm and it’s beautiful. How do you know until you try? Peace, Sam.”

Later that week, while they were on their way to buy groceries, a couple on a motorcycle came out of nowhere and swerved in front of their car, going much too fast.

“Crazy son of a bitch!” her husband said, hitting the brakes.

The girl on the motorcycle looked back, probably to assure herself that they really had got through safely. The girl was smiling. Actually, the girl was too far away for Ellen to see her expression clearly, but she was certain that she saw a smile.

“Crazy son of