Home is a place best arrived at on your own terms. This is what Sherri finds herself thinking as she looks out at the square from the driver’s seat of her rental car. It seems smaller now, and achingly familiar. It’s funny what you don’t realize you remember. She used to rub her hands on the rough bark of the ash trees, read books in their shade, and feed peanuts to the squirrel with the crooked tail. Her father loved those trees because, in the fall, the leaves turned a shade of purple he said he’d never encountered anywhere else. He said the ash tree was considered the Venus of the woods. When they had picnic lunches on the square, he’d lie on the blanket, look up at the leaves, and say, “‘The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed.’” Those trees were the first to explode into leaf in the spring, but also the first to drop. The leaves were in full bloom. She could make out the knots of squirrel nests in the branches.

When Violet took scuba diving lessons, she told Sherri about the process of reentry, of slowly rising back to the surface in order to avoid the bends if oxygen entered her system too quickly. Sherri can feel herself going through her own kind of reentry in those first few moments back home, as though she were under water, rising slowly, allowing East Troy to seep back into her system one molecule at a time.

She braces herself for this return to the site of her lost childhood, and her former self. She’s never before appreciated how lucky she was to grow up on a square, a place that made her believe there was a center to everything, like the “home” square in the middle of a Parcheesi game board. It was a destination, a goal, a safe zone, the emotional vortex of her life. She realizes now that this was exactly what Arthur recognized when he arrived in East Troy.

She’s long since stopped paying attention to the meditation and mindfulness podcast she was listening to and only in that moment becomes aware of the host yammering on. “The first step of mindfulness is to inhabit a beginner’s mind,” he says in his mellow voice. He sounds like he’s prone on the floor with a cat on his belly. Sherri doesn’t buy it. After all, wasn’t it a beginner’s mind that got her into trouble? She flicks off the radio and steps out of the car. Her phone rings. Marco. He only calls with bad news.

“No camels,” he says. “Apparently we need a livestock license.”

Sherri pretends to sound disappointed. “And we can’t get one?”

“It’s not as easy as all that. What sort of Nights of Arabia party doesn’t have camels?”