I walked the mountain that August. I looped Forge Mountain Drive, paced the trails, and sat in the Kingdom. I went down the northwest trail to the bottling factory and over the ridge behind it. I discovered an old quarry in the middle of nowhere. At night I pulled ticks from my scalp over the sink and then crushed them against the beige porcelain with my thumbnail. I walked south and came through the woods to Valley Creek, near the covered bridge. I walked and walked the mountain, memorizing its surfaces, as if my feet knew before I did that I wouldn’t ever be going back. I broke into the bunker on the Nike site, through a rotted window frame. I didn’t find nuclear secrets, just cobwebs, spiders, a broken office chair, and a dead mouse that had turned almost to dust in a trap on the linoleum floor, only the long tail intact. Sometimes I sat up there looking at the bindweed choking the fence, the dead dandelion and chicory. I counted how long it had been since I had pulled weeds with my dad—one year and eleven months. I rewrote days working with him where I could name nutsedge and pokeweed and could haul the tarpaulin of leaves myself, and could tell him then, in the past, all the tree facts I know now.

Charlotte Adams was the first to leave the mountain. It was Wilson who heard. She had rented a house in a new development near Gateway Shopping Center.

“But why didn’t Grady leave?” I asked him. “Why Charlotte?”

“I don’t know,” said Wilson. “He has his doctor’s practice up here. Maybe that’s too hard to move. Maybe Charlotte just wants to get away from all this.”

“How about Sage and the boys? Who will they live with?”

“Don’t know. Maybe both.”

We had driven through the development when it first opened, one night on the way home from school. All the houses looked the same. I had resented it before it ever existed because it had once been beautiful meadow, and then it was steadily destroyed by cement trucks and bulldozers.

Every time I thought of Charlotte Adams, it was as if my insides were being scooped out. That night, after the Acme, I’d told Marie how it scared me to see Charlotte like that, so uncomposed, so unlike herself. She had always had this elegant detachment that I thought was her, being southern and refined and all that. But Marie said she liked Charlotte Adams even more after the Acme.

“It would be far scarier to have met her and instead of seeing her messy and upset, she looked blank and perfect. Like a Stepford wife. She’s been fucking betrayed, she’s upset, and she showed it. She’s real.”