Joel got in his truck and pulled out of the parking lot. For a few moments part of me followed that truck past Billy’s store and down Damascus Church Road to a farmhouse I knew every bit as well as the one my father lived in. “Come on home with me,” Aunt Margaret would say every other Friday night. “I’m tired of dealing with four boys. I need me a sweet little girl to spoil.” The house she and my Uncle Mark lived in had a tin roof, and the nights it rained were always the best. After Ben and I had gotten burned, I slept there often, leaving my own bed and walking the quarter mile to Aunt Margaret’s house wearing pajamas, a coat, and shoes. I always slept deep and peaceful under that tin roof.

CHAPTER 4

You’re a wanderer, Aunt Margaret had told me. It’s the way you look at the mountains; you want to know what’s on the other side. And you’ll never come near being content till you do know. I was eight years old and we were picking blackberries on the east slope of Sassafras Mountain. We had come early, dew soaking our shoes as we sidled up land slanted as a barn roof, shiny milk pails in our hands. Morning sun brightened the mountainside as our first berries pinged the metal. Black-and-yellow writing spiders had cast their webs between some of the bushes, and dew beads twinkled across them like strung diamonds. My fingers purpled as my pail began slowly to fill, a soft, cushiony sound as berry fell on berry. The sun sipped away the last dew from the webs, and I started to sweat under Uncle Mark’s long-sleeved flannel shirt. My arm ached from the pail’s weight. The thin handle dug its imprint on my palm. I sat down in a gap among the bushes, my gaze crossing over Tamassee toward Licklog Mountain. Aunt Margaret had come and stood behind me, her hand brushing leaf litter from my hair as she spoke.

Aunt Margaret’s prophecy had been correct, for college and each new job took me farther from the mountains—first Clemson, then Laurens, and now Columbia. It had not been until the Columbia move that I recognized a steady eastward migration toward Charleston, toward a place I could look out my office window and see not mountains but the Atlantic Ocean.

But I was back now, at least for a little while, traveling the same road as that morning we’d returned from Sassafras Mountain, Aunt Margaret driving as I kept the pails full of blackberries from spilling.

I glanced at Allen and knew he was already working, mapping a lead paragraph for his article or a possible follow-up question for Brennon or Phillips.