Emmett scanned the other cards on the table, taking in the names of the various towns, the motels and restaurants, sights and landmarks, noting that all but one of the pictures promised a bright blue sky.
Conscious that his brother was watching him, Emmett maintained an unchanged expression. But what he was feeling was the sting of resentment—resentment toward their father. He must have intercepted the cards and hidden them away. No matter how angry he had been with his wife, he had no right to keep them from his sons, certainly not from Emmett, who had been old enough to read them for himself. But Emmett felt the sting for no more than a moment. Because he knew that his father had done the only sensible thing. After all, what good could come from the occasional reception of a few sentences written on the back of a three-by-five card by a woman who had willfully abandoned her own children?
Emmett put the postcard from Rawlins back on the table.
—You remember how Mom left us on the fifth of July? asked Billy.
—I remember.
—She wrote us a postcard every day for the next nine days.
Emmett picked up the card from Ogallala again and looked just above the spot where their mother had written Dearest Emmett and Billy, but there was no date.
—Mom didn’t write down the dates, Billy said. But you can tell from the postmarks.
Taking the Ogallala card from Emmett’s hand, Billy turned all the cards over, spread them on the table, and pointed from postmark to postmark.
—July fifth. July sixth. There was no July seventh, but there are two July eighths. That’s because in 1946, July seventh was on a Sunday and the post office is closed on Sunday, so she had to mail two of the cards on Monday. But look at this.
Billy went back to the front pocket of his backpack and took out something that looked like a pamphlet. When he unfolded it on the table, Emmett could see it was a road map of the United States from a Phillips 66. Cutting all the way across the middle of the map was a roadway that had been scored by Billy in black ink. In the western half of the country, the names of nine towns along the route had been circled.
—This is the Lincoln Highway, explained Billy, pointing to the long black line. It was invented in 1912 and was named for Abraham Lincoln and was the very first road to stretch from one end of America to the other.
Starting on the Atlantic Seaboard, Billy began following the highway with his fingertip.
—It starts in Times Square in New York City and it ends three thousand three hundred and ninety miles away in Lincoln Park in San Francisco. And it passes right through Central City, just twenty-five miles from our house.
Billy paused to move his finger from Central City to the little black star that he had drawn on the map to represent their home.
—When Mom left us on the fifth of July, this is the way she went . . .
Taking up the postcards, Billy turned them over and began laying them across the lower half of the map in a westward progression, placing each card under its corresponding town.
Ogallala.
Cheyenne.
Rawlins.
Rock Springs.
Salt Lake City.
Ely.
Reno.
Sacramento.
Until the last card, which showed a large, classical building rising above a fountain in a park in San Francisco.
Billy gave an exhale of satisfaction to have the cards laid out in order on the table. But the whole collection made Emmett uneasy, like the two of them were looking at someone else’s private correspondence—something they had no business seeing.
—Billy, he said, I’m not sure that we should be going to California. . . .
—We have to go to California, Emmett. Don’t you see? That’s why she sent us the postcards. So that we could follow her.
—But she hasn’t sent a postcard in eight years.
—Because July thirteenth was when she stopped moving. All we have to do is take the Lincoln Highway to San Francisco and that’s where we’ll find her.
Emmett’s immediate instinct was to say something to his brother that was sensible and dissuasive. Something about how their mother didn’t necessarily stop in San Francisco; how she could easily have continued on, and most likely had; and that while she might have been thinking of her sons on those first nine nights, all evidence suggested that she hadn’t been thinking of them since. In the end, he settled for pointing out that even if she were in San Francisco, it would be virtually impossible for them to find her.
Billy nodded with the expression of one who had already considered this dilemma.
—Remember how you told me that Mom loved fireworks so much, she took us all the way to Seward on the Fourth of July just so we could see the big display?