“Y’all are late,” Haley informed us as we pulled up to her apartment.

“Your mama’s fault,” Mary Alice said. “She decided to wash her hair after I got there. What’s all that?” She pointed to the various sacks, bags, and suitcases that surrounded Haley. There were so many, it looked like she had been evicted.

“I never can decide what I’ll need at the beach,” Haley said.

“Well, you’re playing it safe.” Mary Alice opened the trunk of the car and we started piling stuff in.

“A cappuccino machine, dear?” she asked.

Haley nodded. “You never know.”

Mary Alice rolled her eyes at me. I didn’t say a word; I’d had enough trouble with coffee that morning.

By ten o’clock, we were hauling down I-65. We made our first pit stop forty miles south of Birmingham at the Shoney’s at Clanton.

“I’ve died and gone to heaven,” Haley said, coming back from the restroom. “Remember, Mama, how we went all the way across South Carolina begging Papa to stop at a bathroom? Tom was like that, too, never wanting to stop.”

“You miss a lot of Confederate cemeteries that way,” Sister said. “And caves. And folks selling quilts.”

“You know what I want, Aunt Sister?” Haley reached for a sweetroll. “I want to stop in Georgiana and see the Hank Williams Museum.”

“We’ll do that,” Sister promised. And we did. We also stopped at The House of Turkey, took a detour to see Hurricane Lake, and walked through a daylily nursery in Wing, Florida. We bought boiled peanuts in Red Level at a farmers’ market and washed them down with Grapicos. And while we were doing all this, we had come down from the Appalachians, traversed the great fertile Black Belt below Montgomery, and entered the coastal plain. As we crossed the Mid-Bay Bridge across Choctawhatchee Bay, the sun was low in the sky, and ahead of us the Gulf of Mexico was a green mirror.

Haley sighed contentedly. “Eight hours to make a four-and-a-half-hour trip. Wonderful.”

We entered the city limits of Destin and Mary Alice slowed down. The speed limit is thirty, which doesn’t mean thirty-one. Sister’s learned this the hard way. “Y’all want to eat first or go to the apartment?” she asked.

“Go to the apartment,” Haley said. “Maybe we’ll see the green flash.” What she was talking about was the bright green flare that is visible some evenings as the last orange of the sun disappears into the Gulf. Even if it doesn’t appear, and usually it doesn’t, just watching the sun sink into the water is spectacular.

“We’ll have to hurry then,” Sister shaded her eyes with her hand and looked toward the western horizon. “The sun’s going down fast.”

We made it to the condo balcony just as the sun touched the water.

“Don’t look right at it,” I warned Haley.