"The letter from Roosevelt McCrary that upended Georgie’s life came the morning of her seventieth birthday—written on Camp Minnie HaHa stationery and dated June 18, 2007. The handwriting sloped, the way Georgie’s father’s had been, the way children were taught to write script in the thirties—the paper smudged from handling. He must have written Georgie and then reread the letter again and again for months before he decided to mail it."
"There was still my father. After Daniel proposed, we stayed on the bed and made a flurry of calls, starting with our closest friends. In a few hours, everyone knew. Everyone, that is, except my father. My father was different. Most of my life we hadn’t had a working telephone number for him. My mother would dial and a recording would click on saying that the line had been disconnected and that there was no new number. Eventually we’d hear from him again, often from overseas. He and his wife Lucille traveled to Macau, to Rio, to Singapore."