I had forgotten the humidity of Tennessee in spring. Every lungful felt like a drink of water. There had been several days of rain before we arrived, followed by clear skies, such that the sun lit up the verdant pastures in greens so bright and vivid they all but begged to be painted.

“You won’t recognize Nashville,” Scott said. “Especially since the tornadoes.”

“Tornadoes?” I said.

“You didn’t know? Just last April, two megatwisters ripped right through the middle of the city. They jumped the Cumberland and made mincemeat of your old neighborhood. Leveled thirty-five buildings downtown and three hundred homes in East Nashville.”

“Your old home at Montague Village?” Arch said. “Gone. Completely demolished.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Don’t worry, everybody there got out before the tornado hit. And your aunt wasn’t living there anymore anyway. She moved out to Donelson a few years ago.”

“You’ve kept tabs on her?”

“She comes around every now and then.”

“When can I see her?”

“Whenever you like.”

“Maybe I’ll wait,” I said. “Until I get the lay of the land.”

“Understood,” Arch said.

“The developers have descended like vultures to snap up all those federally funded building projects,” Scott said. “You haven’t seen so many carpetbaggers on the streets of Nashville since Reconstruction. But Arch here will save us from the Yankee invaders.”

I looked over at Arch.

“How’re you going to do that, exactly?” I asked.

“Later,” he said as we turned into the long driveway out to the farm.

The car came to a stop in front of the house, and the front door opened, and a little girl—My sister, I thought, as if such a thing were as rare as a white elephant—came bounding out, the dark ringlets of her hair bouncing as she descended the porch steps and stopped to stare at me. Behind her was Vanessa, her hair a whiter blond than it used to be, her body longer, perhaps a bit heavier, but only in the way girls become women. Her eyes were as they had always been, and so my own were drawn to them, and to her serene expression, which moored me, for a moment at least.

I looked down at little Dolly.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Charlie.”

“I know,” she said.

“You do, do you?”

“Yep,” she said. “Who’s that for?”

She pointed at the Tiffany bag dangling from my fingers.

“I think you know,” I said.

A gap-toothed grin spread out across her face.

“Can I open it?”