bulky shopping bags in both hands. Lori, behind her, wore a black cape
and a black fedora. They made quite a pair.
Mom hugged me. Her long hair was mostly gray, but her cheeks were
rosy and her eyes as bright as ever. Then Lori hugged me, and I
introduced John.
"Excuse my attire," Mom said. "but I plan to change out of my comfy
shoes into some dress shoes for dinner." She reached into one of her
shopping bags and pulled out a pair of banged-up penny loafers. The
winding road back to the house led under stone bridges, through woods
and villages, and past marsh ponds where swans floated on mirrorlike
water. Most of the leaves had fallen, and gusts of wind sent them
spiraling along the roadside. Through the thickets of bare trees, you
could see houses that were invisible during the summer.
As he drove, John told Mom and Lori about the area, about the duck
farms and the flower farms and the Indian origin of our town's name.
Sitting beside him, I studied his profile and couldn't help smiling. John
wrote books and magazine articles. Like me, he had moved around a lot
while growing up, but his mother had been raised in an Appalachian
village in Tennessee, about a hundred miles southwest of Welch, so you
could say our families hailed from the same neck of the woods. I'd never
met a man I would rather spend time with. I loved him for all sorts of
reasons: He cooked without recipes; he wrote nonsense poems for his
nieces; his large, warm family had accepted me as one of their own. And
when I first showed him my scar, he said it was interesting. He used the
word. "textured." He said. "smooth" was boring but. "textured" was
interesting, and the scar meant that I was stronger than whatever it was
that had tried to hurt me. We pulled into the drive. Jessica, John's
fifteen-year-old daughter from his first marriage, came out of the house,
along with Brian and his eight-year-old daughter, Veronica, and their
bull mastiff, Charlie. Brian hadn't seen much of Mom since Dad's
funeral, either. He hugged her and immediately started ribbing her about