“We’d like apple cobbler for our dessert,” Allen said.

“You got it,” Becky said.

Allen stared at a plate filled with sliced barbecue, baked beans, hush puppies, and cole slaw.

“It’s not mustard-based.”

“Of course it isn’t,” I said. “Up here we know mustard is for turkey sandwiches, though some of the old folks do use it as a chest salve.”

“What flavors it, then?”

“Vinegar. That and hickory smoke.” I nodded at his plate. “Try it. Then try to tell me with a straight face it’s not the best barbecue you’ve ever tasted.”

Allen raised a small portion to his mouth, then a larger one. “I may have to rethink my views on barbecue,” he said.

Maybe it was the food or just the chance to relax after driving four hours, but Allen was talkative. He told me about his newspaper work in Georgia and Virginia before the Washington Post had hired him eleven years ago.

“What was it like growing up in Chester?” I asked, trying to get something out of him less tied to work.

“Probably pretty much like growing up here, the only difference being the mountains. There was the mill, but not much else. I did my share of hunting and traipsing in the woods. I fished and swam in a river. A good place to grow up, though when I was eight years old I already knew I’d leave.”

“How did you know that?”

“My third-grade teacher had one of those maps that flattens out the whole world. It was so big it covered half a wall. On the first day of class she took a pin and stuck it on the map. This is how big Chester is compared to the rest of the world, she’d said. Then she stuck a thumbtack where the pin had been. That’s South Carolina, she’d said. I knew right then I’d have to know more of the world than what a pin or thumb-tack could cover.”

Becky replaced our plates with bowls of cobbler. I looked around and saw more familiar faces. Kids roamed the room while their parents talked between tables. Hank Williams wailed on the Wurlitzer. Friday night in Tamassee, South Carolina, the pinprick where I’d been born and raised. It wasn’t much, but it was what almost all the kids I’d grown up with had settled for. They had their own kids now and their blue-collar jobs and mortgages, and this was what passed as a luxury, one night a week eating out and some Saturday night music at Billy’s store. But as I looked around the room at several people I’d gone to school with, they seemed, at least tonight, satisfied with their lives.

“So when you were a child did you know you’d leave here?” Allen asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you ever think about coming back here to live?”

“No.”

“Why not?”