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as soon they handle it for you. Of course, I told her she’d better hold on for a while until she heard from you. I had a terrible feeling you might get some cockeyed idea.”
    “I haven’t really been thinking about them,” I admitted.
    “Well, they’re worth some serious thought. I loved your mom, but that family …” He sighed again. “They thought I was from another planet.”
    I tried to recall what I knew about them. Horace was the oldest, Elaine the youngest. My mother was the middle child. I had no idea what either of them looked like. Last I heard, Horace had two boys, and Elaine and her husband had adopted two kids because they couldn’t have any of their own.
    For ten years or so after my mother died, Elaine dutifully kept my dad up-to-date with Christmas cards—Hanukkah cards when she remembered or could find them. Sometimes she sent the same card two or three years in a row. Several featured a red robin perched on a branch, with musical notes coming out of its beak and snow glitter on its wings. Another favorite was a snowman smoking a pipe, with a wreath around his neck. The accompanying messages were scrawled in a large, looped hand.
    “Edgar,” one of them said. “We are fine, thank the Lord. Mom and Dad are healthy now. Dad had a herniated disk in September but he’s recovered fairly well. Horace and Kathy moved down the road from us into a big house with a pool. Last summer Horace finished building a complex over near Madisonville and named a road Ellen Lane. My Larry’s got a church in Soddy Daisy now and an AM radio show and we keep busy. The kids are fine. Take care of that little girl and God Bless. Elaine Burns.”
    Eventually the notes got shorter, and after a while they stopped coming altogether. I never asked my dad if he had written back.
    “Have you told Adam you’re leaving?” Dad was asking.
    “Yeah, I told him.”
    “And these new plans of yours have nothing to do with him?”
    His knowing tone irritated me.
“No,
Dad. I’m just tired of the city. I’m sick of my job. I’ve got a chance to try something totally different, maybe even work on my own stuff for a change. What’s wrong with that?”
    “Nothing’s wrong with it.”
    “I thought you might be proud of me.”
    “I am proud of you, honey. I just think you should take a good hard look at what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.”
    I started to protest, but I stopped myself. The phone call wasn’t going the way I’d planned. On the subway home I’d imagined that I’d tell him and he’d gasp with surprise, shout the good news to Susan, offer to help me move.
    “Well, I’ve got to go,” I said. “Thanks for the support, Dad.”
    “Aw, Cassie, come on. Just think about it, is all I’m saying.”
    “I
have
thought about it.”
    After taking down Elaine’s number I hung up and slouched into a chair. I grabbed a magazine off the floor and flipped through it gloomily before tossing it back on the rug. So maybe he was right. Maybe I was leaving to get away from Adam. So what? Anyway, that was only part of it, not the whole thing; it was much more complicated. I wanted to get away from Adam, yes, and the city, but it was more than that. What had Adam said?
It’s just that usually when people pick up and move they’re either going toward something or running away.
Yes, I suddenly decided, I was running toward something, something I’d been running from all my life.
    I hadn’t seen that before but I saw it now, and I was filled with a sense of my own power. I was certain that if I could explain it to my dad that way, he’d hear the strength in my voice and understand. I decided I’d call him again in a few days, when he’d had some time to think it over. When it would be too late for me to change my mind.
    * * *
    “Dear Mrs. Clyde,” the letter began. “You don’t know me, but—”
    I tore the paper in two and started again.
    “Dear Grandmother, I know how surprised you must be to get a