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The airline attendant stood at the mouth of the plane and said good-bye to every single other passenger before she came back for Chloe. Chloe got hot and sweaty. She could feel her hair starting to frizz. She certainly wasn't going to make a good impression on Bernadette feeling hot and looking frizzy. She unzipped her vest pocket to make sure that her money was still there. The fifty-dollar bill was no longer crisp. It actually felt hot. She could not remember ever having paper money feel hot before. Her first conclusion about spending a summer in Florida was: No more vests -- dressing in layers was out. The second was: If Bernadette did not have air-conditioning, she might have to use the fifty dollars to make other arrangements. A hotel room was not above her means.

At last the stewardess came for her. As she emerged from the jetway, she saw Bernadette standing with the people remaining. Nick had shown her some recent pictures of his sister to refresh her memory but what she remembered of her -- that she was a tall person -- would have been enough. Bernadette stood above the crowd.

Bernadette was a full six feet tall, as skinny as a silhouette, pale as a glass of buttermilk, and so nearsighted that her eyeglasses could be sent into orbit to do the job of the Hubble space telescope. She wore a long, full, printed skirt with a drawstring waist, sandals, and a dark T-shirt that didn't have anything printed on it. She had a head of unruly silver-and-black curly hair that grew in several directions, only one of which was down. It looked as if you could stuff a mattress -- king-size -- with it. Chloe wondered if this woman ever had a good hair day.

The airline attendant would not give Bernadette custody until she showed a picture ID. Bernadette took out her driver's license. As the stewardess looked at the picture, Chloe looked at the numbers -- the last two were the year of her birth. Bernadette was forty-five. Chloe thought, No wonder she has so much gray in her hair.

They greeted each other with smiles but did not hug or kiss. They did not even kiss the air over each others shoulders as grown-ups often do.

As they walked toward baggage pickup, Bernadette said, "I'll call you Chloe." Chloe found that a strange thing for an almost-relative to say. Chloe was, after all, her name. When her name was to be written, Chloe insisted that the two dots be placed over the e. She loved having two dots over the e of her name and told everyone that they were called a cliaeresis and meant that both the o and the e were to be sounded. Even before she started first grade she would not allow anyone to skip her diaeresis. Everyone called her Chloe. No one shortened it to Chlo. Why would this woman think of calling her anything but Chloe?

It would be no use telling this person, who was stuck with the same last name, that it was Pollack that she was considering dropping as soon as she came of age or got married -- whichever came first. There was always the possibility of hyphenating her last name with her husband's, but she already had two last names.

Nick had adopted Chloe when she was five, a year after he married her mother. When they drew up the adoption papers, they tucked her birth father's last name between her new last name and her two given names, and she became Chloe June Parker Pollack. If she used all four of her names, she would run out of spaces on credit-card applications, so except for contracts and report cards, she was simply called Chloe Pollack.

As they walked farther along the concourse, Bernadette said, "You call me Bernadette. Aunt won't be necessary. And I don't like Bernie. Or Aunt Bernie or Auntie. For a while, when I was twelve, I wanted everyone to call me Detta. No reason except that I was twelve and trying to fit whatever name seemed more glamorous than Bernadette. I like to be called Bernadette. I've become my name."

"All right," Chloe said, feeling very much the grownup in this conversation. "Chloe and Bernadette. That's what it will be for our time remaining." Time remaining, sounded like a grown-up thing to say. She thought she was beginning to understand why Nick had asked her to help this person.