Example result

It was the second week of June, 1962, and the kitchen was hot by eight. Nan folded the two pages twice, creased them with her thumbnail, and got them into the envelope before she could read them over and lose her nerve.

She wrote the zip code from memory, the way you do with a street you have known since you were small. Then the stamp, eight cents, pressed down harder than it needed to be.

Mrs. Vance had her radio in the window again. "Please Please Me" for the third time before nine, and the sound came down the drive after Nan like something she had forgotten to put away. She walked to the box at the end of the road with the envelope held out from her side, the way you carry something you have decided not to think about.

A plane went over low on its way out of Idlewild, one of the new 727s, and she stopped in the gravel to watch it the way she still stopped for planes. Her mother had done that. It was the one thing of her mother's she had not managed to put down.

The walk back took longer. It always did. By the time she reached the porch the heat had come up off the road and the morning had that flat white look it got before noon, and her father was awake and wanting his coffee and the television on for The Fugitive, and she would sit through it beside him the way she sat through most mornings now, waiting for something in the room to change.