“You’re beautiful. You really are. Inside and out.” Sherri gives Raylee a long hug—long because she doesn’t want her to see the tears welling up in her eyes. Even after all these years she feels she needs to stay composed in front of her young charge.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

She might as well get it over with. She’s avoided the lake long enough, ever since her abrupt departure.

Sherri feels so discombobulated from her encounters with Raylee and Val that she doesn’t trust herself to remember the back roads to Arthur’s cottage. She takes Highway 15, now called Highway ES, to J, wishing the letters would spell something that made sense. The wetlands between ES and the freeway have been destroyed to accommodate self-storage sheds that go on and on and on. Who are all these people with so much junk they can’t part with when she’d spent most of her adult life trying to let go? At the edge of East Troy and Mukwonago she is disheartened by the discovery of characterless exurban cul-de-sac homes where there’d once been an apple orchard. They looked temporary somehow, as if they were parts of a movie set. The beautiful old oak trees she remembers lining the road had been cut down to make way for sewers, electric and gas lines, and there was a sea of manicured grass where there’d once been prairie. There is so much people neglect in their lives; why, she wonders, are some homeowners inclined to tend so devotedly to something as mundane as a yard—space made only more boring and nondescript by their effort?

Up ahead she is happy to see that the old barn that housed the Elegant Farmer is still there, only now it is decorated with big black eyes and a grinning smile. She and her mother used to go there to buy produce and milk, or to pick strawberries in the adjacent fields. Now the fields, aside from a small orchard, are gone. A sign says they are famous for their home-baked pie in a bag. She pulls into the parking lot and wanders through the aisles of the farm store, stalling, her stomach in knots. Why was she going back to Arthur’s? Why return now? She worries she might run into Roberta at the store. Would she even recognize her old friend? They’d made plans to meet later that day, another miracle of Facebook. They exchange messages occasionally, and like each other’s posts, but they are both uncomfortable with social media, too uptight to share anything of real substance. It makes Sherri nervous to think about seeing her in the flesh. She has no idea what her old friend thinks of her after all these years.