She came to the door on a Tuesday.
I almost missed it. I was in my room with the Walkman, running through Side B for what felt like the hundredth time, and the knock was so light that for a second I thought I had imagined it.
I hadn't.
Teppie was standing on the porch in the particular way she stood in places she didn't intend to stay — weight on one foot, sketchbook under her arm, already turned slightly toward the street. She was wearing the same white T-shirt. Her hair was down. She had a bus ticket in her hand.
"Hey, baloney," she said.
I looked at the ticket. "When?"
"This afternoon." She said it simply, the way she said everything that was difficult — with the flat calm of someone who has made the decision and is now living in it. I didn't know what to say. I had known, on some level, since the railroad tracks. Since she'd handed me the drawing and said you'll need something to remember this by. She had been saying goodbye since the day we met. I just hadn't been ready to hear it until now.
"Where?" I asked.
"San Francisco." A pause. "My aunt."
I nodded. The porch was warm. Down the block, somebody's sprinkler was making its clicking arc over a dry lawn.
"You're not going to tell me not to go," she said. It wasn't quite a question.
"No," I said.
She looked at me then — really looked, with the full weight of those eyes that always seemed to be a step ahead of whatever was happening. Something in her face shifted. Softened.
"Good," she said. "You're the only one who wouldn't."
I thought about Jimmy. About the river. About the whole architecture of the summer and how much of it had been built to hold things in place rather than let them move.
"The sketchbook," I said.
She glanced down at it. "Keeping it." Then, after a beat: "I drew you in it. In the good version."
I didn't know what to say to that either. There wasn't anything to say.
We stood there for a moment in the Stockton heat — two people at the end of something that had never quite been officially named, which was maybe why it had stayed so clean.
Teppie reached into the front pocket of the sketchbook and pulled out a folded piece of paper. She held it out. I took it.
"Don't open it yet," she said.
"When?"
She thought about it. "When you're somewhere that isn't here." She tilted her head. "You'll know."
I put it in my pocket without opening it.
She stepped off the porch. Stopped at the end of the path and looked back over her shoulder — just once, just briefly, the way people look back when they want to confirm that the thing they're leaving is real.
"You're going to be good, Kevin," she said.
Not good at music. Not good at life. Just: good. The word as a full sentence.
I raised a hand. She turned and walked toward the street, the sketchbook under her arm, the bus ticket in her hand, moving through Stockton the way she always moved through everywhere — without asking permission.
At the corner she turned left. And then she was gone.
I stood on the porch for a long time. The sprinkler kept clicking. The afternoon kept being what it was. I reached into my pocket and touched the folded paper without opening it. I kept it closed all the way through senior year. I kept it closed through the First Stage and the dam and the September afternoon at the river. I opened it on a Tuesday night in Sacramento in November 1984, standing outside a bar that smelled like cigarette smoke and other people's courage, still shaking from my first real gig.
Inside, in her careful cursive: See? I told you.
That was all. That was everything.
I don't know if she ever knew I opened it. I don't know if she thought about it at all. But I've thought about it every time I've played somewhere new, somewhere I was afraid of — which is a lot of places. She was right, the way she was right about most things. I was somewhere that wasn't there. And it was enough.