Zachary stumbled across rock outcroppings and past the gaping, ominous mouths of caves. He had always hated caves and caverns, dark, narrow spaces. A middle school trip to Linville Caverns found him rooted in fear, unable to step into the hole in the hillside. No assurances that it was well lit and paved, or that hundreds of people visited the cave, could entice him to take a single step in its direction.

He pushed on. A dense forest unfolded before him. Zachary jotted notations in a notebook and estimated the number of feet from one point to the next. He banded trees with different colors of surveyor tape, to indicate this or that feature. But would he, he wondered, knowing his lack of surveying skills, ever be able to locate these trees again?

Not the beauty of this land, the breath and depth of the forest, the thundering waterfalls, abated his lust for land, which grew only stronger. He must convince his father to deed him twenty or thirty acres, out of sight of the buildings at Bella’s Park. A dozen rental houses would provide him the income to support Sarina and Sarah and leave him free to satisfy his lust for change, adventure, and travel. He avoided considering the consequences of this plan: bulldozers leveling trees and tearing at the earth, roads and erosion, washouts, streams of water trickling or pouring down the hillside.

His father would say no. Why? Meanness. Plain old meanness. What was this distrust that lay like a pall between them? They had never been able to communicate. Their relationship, as far back as he could recall, had been suffused with a lack of ease. Why? His father had never raised a hand to him. What had happened between them, then, to create such distance and ill will that had persisted into adulthood?

As he circumvented rock outcroppings and used a stick to push aside the prickly branches of bushes, Zachary searched his memory for clues. He had been, perhaps, inordinately attached to his mother. He had adored her and followed her about like a puppy. He remembered weeping as if his heart would break—he thought it surely would—those first few days when she left him at kindergarten.

Had his father been jealous of the many hours his mother spent with her son, reading to him, taking walks with him, putting him to bed at night? Even when he was thirteen, she would sit and talk with him at bedtime. They had both disliked the smells of the dairy, and they gave silly names to cows his father prized: Dumbbell, Stinky, Miss Disgusting. His mother taught him how to draw, although he could never get the colors right to paint, and he remembered with pleasure the many times they had laughed together.