She’d been gone all except the first four years of his life, but her timid smile seemed familiar.

A wisp of a memory floated into his mind of dancing with her in the kitchen. Her hair had been dark and swaying to her waist then, and she’d been singing. His dad came in through the back door and saw them. He’d lifted Ben up on the counter and danced with his wife while Ben laughed. They’d twirled to a country song.

The woman walking toward them had lived a completely different life than she would have had here, Ben thought. She was thinner maybe, and her skin was no longer tanned from the sun. Her clothes were different somehow. She looked a bit boho in her sandals that were laced almost to her knees, and with a colorful scarf flowing around her. She reminded him of the artists who sometimes displayed their work at the college, not a woman born and raised in the valley.

She moved with a grace he hadn’t noticed as a child. And as she neared, Ben saw fine wrinkles on her face that somehow blended with her beauty.

She walked toward his dad.

“Joseph, I’ve come home,” she said.

Ben heard a hint of a foreign accent flavoring her words.

He turned to his father. The man who’d stayed and raised him alone. The man who never expressed love in words, but who Ben had never doubted loved him. No matter what was said here today, no matter what happened, Ben would stand with his father. If the old guy wanted her to go, Ben would open her car door for her and wave goodbye.

She took another step toward them. “I’m home.”

A dozen things ran through Ben’s mind. Fiery words his dad might yell. Maybe he’d order her off his land. Maybe all the words he’d held in over the years would explode out of him.

But his father just stood there, his back straight, almost rigid. His words came low. “It’s about time.”

Ten minutes later Ben was in his Jeep flying back to town, feeling like he’d been struck by lightning and no one noticed.

“Did you see that, Jenny?” he said for the tenth time. “She didn’t even look at me, her only son. Her only child—that I know of. Did you see that? She just looked at my dad like I was invisible.”

Ben glanced at Jenny and wasn’t surprised she was laughing. The scene he’d just witnessed should go in some drunk-weekend scene in a movie called Seniors Go Wild. His dad had smiled like he’d never seen his dad smile. Like he was having a stroke and welcomed it.