The Perfect Letter Read Online Free Page A

Leigh she’d officially run out of excuses to stay away, that she’d better get her butt on a plane and come home, for once.
    Leigh stepped off the plane into immediate Texas heat; she could feel it radiating off the jetway, which she tottered up in heels that suddenly seemed too high, too citified, too painful. By the time she got down to Carousel Four in baggage claim, her feet were killing her. Only pride was keeping her from reaching down and pulling off her shoes.
    In baggage claim Leigh didn’t see Chloe anywhere, not at first. There was a church youth group gathered around Carousel Two in matching neon-yellow T-shirts proclaiming DISNEY OR BUST , several sets of beaming elderly grandparents holding stuffed animals or toy trucks, a few scrawny musicians in knit caps and long beards carrying heavy instrument cases, and a couple of middle-aged women hugging and smearing each other’s lipstick. But no Chloe. Leigh sighed.
    She was about to text WHERE ARE YOU? when at last she caught a glimpse of jagged-cut pink hair and bright red cowboy boots under a short flowered dress of the kind favored by cute hippie girls from Brooklyn to Portland. Only Chloe could pull off such a look so effortlessly, though—she’d have been as much at home singing the blues onstage at a hipster bar in Williamsburg as in East Austin.Out of the corner of her eye Chloe spotted Leigh, turned her back on the disappointed security guard she’d been chatting up, and immediately they were both eighteen again, squealing and throwing their arms around each other and making a spectacle of themselves. All around them, the passengers stopped to watch them embrace, the Texas hippie chick and the cool New York brunette.
    â€œHoly shit, look at you!” Chloe drawled, dragging it out like ho-leeeee-sheee-it. She stood back to admire Leigh’s outfit. “Miss Fancy Pants. I almost didn’t recognize you. You’ve gone uptown, baby!”
    Leigh shook her head and laughed. “I look like a hog raised on concrete. I’d recognize those boots from fifteen miles away, though. And the hair! I like the pink. It suits you. Kind of cheery, really.”
    â€œYeah, well, I guess it was time for me to outgrow my Goth stage.”
    â€œIt had to happen sooner or later.”
    â€œDamn, you look good enough to eat. Look at those heels,” Chloe said. “I can’t believe you can walk in those things.”
    â€œWell, walking might be an overstatement,” Leigh said, bending down to slip them off at last. She carried them loosely on two fingers, standing on the linoleum in her bare feet. “Oh my God, I’ve been dying to do that since Fifty-seventh Street.”
    â€œNow, that looks like the Leigh Merrill I remember. Barefoot at the airport. You should have left those torture devices at home.”
    â€œAgreed. I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. “I’m starving. There’s no good Tex-Mex in New York. I’m thinking I want the biggest, greasiest burrito in town. You know a good place?”
    Chloe grinned and said, “Don’t I always?”
    They headed for a sawdust-and-roses bar not far from downtown that swirled with music, a touch of country, a touch of blues, a woman’s low voice singing sweetly about heartbreak, enough twang in her voiceto remind Leigh that she was really in Texas again, a moment both welcome and surreal. Austin had changed more than she’d thought: the downtown was nearly unrecognizable to her, crammed with shiny new high-rises that nearly crowded out the old tower at One Congress Parkway. New Vietnamese and Thai places had sprung up in East Austin, and the old Town Lake had been renamed Ladybird Lake, but it still looked the same, crammed with kayakers and dogs chasing Frisbees onshore. They crossed the Congress Avenue Bridge, a favorite landmark from their high-school days, in Chloe’s rusting old Ford, and Leigh craned