I flicked the ash off the end of my cigarette, pinched the butt, and tucked it into the front pocket of my jeans.

“So you like the new man?” I said.

“He’s a bit of a sponge, but he keeps her occupied. I do worry that she might be fool enough to marry him, but I doubt her accountant would let her do it without a prenup,” she said. “And what about you?”

“I’m between things right now.”

“Arch says you’re living with your old art teacher,” she said. “I remember thinking you had such a crush on her.”

“If I had, I’m not her type, so nothing would have come of it,” I said. “I expect Arch told you that too.”

“He did,” she said. “I never would have guessed. We were so sheltered, weren’t we?”

“I guess we were.”

“We’ll have to come down to see you in San Miguel,” she said. “A friend of Daddy’s owns a hotel there.”

“Which one?”

“Where Arch stayed, I assume.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Dolly emerged from the barn, waving her hands over her head. A scattering of clouds moved across the sky, sending swift-moving shadows across the meadow.

“Why did it take this to bring you back to us?” Vanessa asked.

“I don’t know. Pride, I guess. Habit. You get used to living a certain way in a certain place, and you just keep doing it.”

“What about your family? Your home?”

“This was never home to me. I was always living in someone else’s house.”

“We missed you,” she said. “Very much.”

My throat ached. Why did it matter to me that she had said “We” and not “I”?

Dolly waved at us.

“Come on,” she said.

We walked down the hill toward where my sister stood waiting for us.

five

The roads leading into Nashville, pure farmland and hill country the last time I’d seen them, were now lined with strip malls and apartment complexes, and residential developments full of starter homes and condominiums with identical facades and floor plans.

“You told me I wouldn’t recognize it,” I said.

“You’re either growing or you’re dying,” Arch replied.

On Belle Meade Boulevard, however, things were as they had always been. When I saw those houses for the first time as a boy from the wrong side of the river, they had dazzled me. Now, they filled me with a sense of the familiar, albeit tinged with melancholy.

They put me in the carriage house, in my mother’s old bedroom. Mine had been turned into an office, which I found filled with a dozen blank canvases, along with an additional rolled canvas, an easel erected in the corner, and another portable one on a desk next to a few hundred dollars’ worth of new acrylic and oil paints.