I knew at once that it was from Rhoda.

I had heard nothing beyond a Christmas card from her in at least two years, and more likely three. So why did I know the letter was from her? Perhaps in part because she used my full name, Priscilla Rountree Kapp, as if she had started to address me as Priscilla Rountree and then remembered, and added the Kapp afterward rather than trouble to tear up the envelope and start over. So like her. Perhaps because, in answer to the automatic if unconscious question, “Now who on earth would be writing to me from a hotel in Las Vegas?” the immediate answer was Rhoda Muir.

Perhaps ESP. Perhaps I had lately been thinking of her. Perhaps anything. It doesn’t matter.

The letter, like the envelope, was typed. Rhoda has always typed her letters. I have always written mine by hand, partly out of a vestigial sense of decorum, I guess. (And I wish I were hand writing this, however much longer it might take, because I feel so much more comfortable that way, so much more personal, so much more alone with myself, hunched over a desk scribbling furtively. But I shall accustom myself to this, I think.)

I read:

Beloved Priss-Puss As you see, I am in Las Vegas. Not to gamble, however, but to cut my losses.

I don’t know how much of this you may have sensed-we’ve had so little contact lately-but my marriage to Robert Keith Dandridge went downhill from the wedding night on-har har-and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t make the pieces fit. We have spent the last two years or so not quite getting divorced, and that got boring after a while, so I hied myself to this city, than which there is no place quite so chrome-and-steel-and-plastic-and-yuk revolting, take my word for it-and I got a piece of paper entitling me to throw my wedding ring away, which I in fact did. Literally. Down the fucking sewer.

Fantastic sense of immediate liberation. Visions of Ancient Mariner with albatross gone. Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation. (Q: Did Lincoln actually read the Emancipation Proclamation? And if so, to whom? Another Q: Can you, to save your soul, imagine Nixon on nationwide TV reading the Emancipation Proclamation to the American public? Though come to think of it, the rat bastard would be more likely to repeal it.)