I had my choice of where to sit, though the room would fill quickly when people started getting off work. Stools lined the counter and picnic tables filled the room’s center. The barbecue pit was right outside the screen door, and a pungent mix of hickory smoke, vinegar, and cooked pork drifted in through the screen. I walked to the back where booths lined the wall and sat down. Unlike Billy’s store, nothing had changed here except the date on the wall calendar. I let my gaze linger on the battered metal cash register, the stools repaired with duct tape, and the Wurlitzer jukebox that played decades-old 45s.

I could frame all of it—cash register, stools, and jukebox—into one photograph and create the kind of picture you find in a doctor’s office or on a wall calendar because it invokes a supposedly simpler time and place. A picture that, were I to send it to him, would hang in a prominent place in my brother Ben’s house. A picture he’d point to fondly and explain its place in his past to friends and in-laws.

The last time we talked, Ben had spoken of bike trips and nights camping out with Billy in the backyard. Listening to him, you would have thought he’d gone through childhood with nothing worse happening to him than a stubbed toe. Someone who didn’t know him well would say he was merely in denial, but I did know Ben well, and I knew the life he’d made for himself as a man. The early history of his life was like history written in chalk on a blackboard—something he could smudge and then erase through sheer good-heartedness.

But I wasn’t like my brother. I couldn’t let things go. I didn’t even want to. Forgetting, like forgiving, only blurred things. Even Ben, for all his nostalgia, had put the whole width of the United States between him and South Carolina.

“So what’s good?” Allen said, as he sat down and opened the menu.

“The special.”

“I don’t see it,” Allen said.

“It’s not on the menu,” I said. “You have to ask. Only locals are worthy of the special. But since you’re with me you can order it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Becky, Mama Tilson’s daughter-in-law, came to take our order.

“Two specials,” Allen said.

“Hush puppies or rolls?” Becky asked.

“Hush puppies,” Allen said.

“And what to drink?”

“Sweet tea.”

Becky left to get our drinks.

“How’d I do?” Allen asked.

“She’s got you nailed as a downstate sand lapper.”

“What gave me away?”

“The sweet tea.”

“How so?”

“That adjective doesn’t exist at Mama Tilson’s. It’s not tea unless it is sweetened. Saying sweet tea here is like asking for pork barbecue.”

“But I was doing well up until then?”

“Pretty good,” I said. “Though you didn’t tell her if you wanted apple or peach cobbler.”

“Which one was I supposed to say?”