* * *

In the spring, Emily gave birth to a healthy boy with a head of dark hair and a set of lungs that would have made Pavarotti proud. They named him Gabriel.

During that busy, blooming spring, Zane took a pretty blonde named Orchid to the prom—his romance with Ashley having faded—and had his first full-out sexual experience.

He decided sex, the real thing, ranked right up there with baseball.

Britt took on the role of Rizzo in the spring musical of Grease, fell briefly if madly in love with a gangly sophomore who handed her her first heartbreak.

Zane received his acceptance letter from UVA, breathed out in relief and trepidation.

He graduated, and though the whole ceremony seemed a blur of endings and beginnings, he found all he needed to find.

Micah, waiting for his turn to cross the stage. Dave giving Zane a fist pump. His grandparents looking misty-eyed. His sister, just grinning. Lee holding the baby so Emily could stand and cheer.

His world. His true foundation. He had to build something on it that mattered.

PART TWO

HOMECOMINGS

Home is where one starts from.

—T. S. ELIOT

You don’t have to swing hard to hit a home run.

If you got the timing, it’ll go.

—YOGI BERRA

CHAPTER EIGHT

February 2019

Darby hadn’t stuck a pin in a map to choose Lakeview, North Carolina. She’d had a system.

She wanted South, but not Deep South. She wanted water, but not the ocean. No big cities, but not too rural. And she wanted to look out windows, wherever that might be, and see growing things, trees, gardens.

Eventually, she’d want to make connections, make friends, but no real rush on it.

And she wanted time. Needed time. She gave herself that—wherever she picked, she’d take at least two weeks before deciding to move on if it didn’t suit. If it did, she’d move in.

She needed a place, a purpose, something to hold her down. For too long she’d felt as weightless as a balloon, one that once untethered could just float away.

She didn’t want to float. She wanted to plant roots.

She’d studied maps, combed the internet.

North Carolina seemed to hit the marks. Good growing season, but resting time as well. And the High Country—something she’d known almost nothing about before those comb throughs—appealed.

She hadn’t thought of mountains, and she liked the idea of seeing them rising up.

Lakeview seemed to check more boxes. She’d have the water she craved, those mountains she hadn’t known she wanted, a decent-size town, and reasonable distance to good-size cities when she needed or wanted what they offered.

If it didn’t work, well, she’d move on.

With that location in mind, she studied climate charts, rainfall, growing season, native plants, spread out to businesses, activities.

Where did people shop, where did they eat, what did they do? She shifted over to hotels, motels, B and Bs, rental homes. Then struck on the web page for Walker Lakeside Bungalows.

She liked the look of Emily Walker Keller, liked reading that the bungalows and business had been in her family for three generations. And she liked the look of them. Separate, private, but not lonely or really alone. Plenty of trees. Woods really, which struck some other previously unexplored interest inside her.

She’d stuck the pin in the map at that point, took the leap of making an online reservation. A month. If the two weeks proved enough, she’d just eat the rest of the cost, move on.

An adventure, she’d told herself as she’d packed everything she had left. She’d sold or donated the rest. Traveling light, she thought, and with nothing to hold her to the house that was no longer hers—in the pretty suburb of Baltimore—she loaded her car.

She turned once to study the lovely old brick house, its gardens sleeping under a layer of fresh February snow. The new owners had given her the afternoon after the morning settlement to, well, move on, and she appreciated it.

They’d appreciate the gardens, the dance of the weeping pear’s branches when spring came. They’d mow the lawns, sit in the kitchen, sleep in the bedrooms. The house would live again.

It hadn’t in nearly a year. It had just gone to sleep. Like she had.

It deserved to hold a family again, and now that it would, she could leave it without regret.

She got in the car, put on her sunglasses against the glare of sun, turned the radio up—loud.

She moved on.

The direct route clocked in at about eight hours. Darby took a week. The journey, in her mind, was about exploration, adventure, and in no small way freedom. On the road, she could be whoever she wanted to be, go wherever the urge struck.

Time out of time, she figured, so salt and vinegar chips and a cold Coke for breakfast worked fine.

She watched snow fall outside her window in a Motel 6 in the Shenandoah Valley, wound into West Virginia because why not? Took the back roads, climbing the mountains, cruising down them again. And wound back east.

Charlottesville earned an entire day. A tour of Monticello, long browses through art galleries, and an amazing ramp risotto with a crisp pinot grigio to cap off the day.

Out of Charlottesville, the back roads took her through farmland, vineyards, small towns, past old homes and new developments. Into the tentative hints of spring, the haze of green like a promise, the air like a cautious sigh.

Because she wanted to start her day crossing into North Carolina, Darby chose a motel near the border, ate southern fried chicken in a diner served by a cheerful waitress named Mae who called her sweetie-pie.

Or sweetah-pah in her lovely accent.

Mae had a fuzzy cloud of yellow hair, bright and bold against the hint of dark roots, an ample bosom, and a smile as comforting as the mashed potatoes and gravy on Darby’s plate.

She spent the last night of her road trip listening to the couple in the next room have a whole lot of enthusiastic, vocal sex. As compared to other overheard motel sex along the route, Darby decided “Oh God, SuSIE!” and “Jack, Jack, Jack!” won top prize.

When her internal alarm woke her just before dawn, she rolled out of bed to shower. After studying her face in the mirror, she concluded that, since she’d show that face in Lakeview later in the day, some makeup wouldn’t hurt.

She pulled on jeans, a T-shirt, a hoodie, laced on her battered and beloved Wolverines, and blew a kiss to Susie and Jack as she swung her duffle over her shoulder.

She hit the vending machines for a pack of Oreos and a Coke, sat a moment watching the eastern sky wake up, flirting back the night with its pinks and roses.

She headed south, crossed into North Carolina with the sun.

Driving through the morning, she let her mind drift. Not time, not yet, to think of the practical, the what-happens-next. This still spread as the whatever, and she could take any road, still detour, still turn north, or east.

She could opt to miss a day or two of her reservation, or cancel it altogether. Destiny rested in her hands, and no one else’s.

But she wound west, saw the mountains. At first like shadows in the sun, then taking form and shape. Going with the pull, she headed toward them. Time to see, she told herself. Time to try.

Her first sight of Lakeview came with the sun, sparkling bright. Streaming down mountains, snugged into valleys, glowing on foothills. And casting diamonds on the blue lake.