Then he received his transfer, and after that things sped up so; for he wouldn’t hear of leaving her behind but must marry her immediately and take her with him. So they had their Baptist wedding — both of them out of breath, Pearl always pictured later — and spent their honeymoon moving to Newport News. She never even got to enjoy her new status among her girlfriends. She didn’t have time to show off a single one of her trousseau dresses, or to flash her two gold rings — the narrow wedding band and the engagement ring, set with a pearl, inscribed To a Pearl among Women. Everything seemed so unsatisfying.

They moved, and they moved again. For the first six years they had no children and the moves were fairly easy. She’d gaze at each new town with hopeful eyes and think: This may be where I’ll have my son. (For pregnancy, now, took on the luster that marriage had once had — it was the treasure that came so easily to everyone but her.) Then Cody was born, and moving seemed much harder. Children had a way of complicating things, she noticed. There were the doctors and the school transcripts and this, that, and the other. Meanwhile she looked around and saw that somehow, without her noticing, she’d been cut off from most of her relatives. Aunts and uncles had died while she’d been too far away to do more than send a sympathy note. The house where she was born was sold to a man from Michigan; cousins married strangers with last names she’d never heard of; even the street names were changed so she’d be lost if she ever went back. And it struck her once, in her forties, that she really had no notion what had become of that grandpa with the mothball breath. He couldn’t still be living, could he? Had he died and no one thought to inform her? Or maybe they’d sent the news to an out-of-date address, three or four years behind times. Or she might have heard but simply forgotten, in the rush of some transfer or other. Anything was possible.