“Jim used to have a lot of late-night meetings,” I said. “I think most of them were with my mother.”

“This is how it gets done, Charlie.”

“Politics.”

“Yep.”

Jamie returned from the restroom, his mood considerably elevated. He stood between me and Arch, and slung his arms around our shoulders.

“Here we are, together again,” he said. “The three amigos. God, weren’t those days the best?”

Jamie lurched forward, reached for the string hanging beneath a large brass bell fastened to one of the pillars that held up the glass racks, and rang it three times.

“Roger,” he cried, “a round for everyone, on the house. I want to make a toast.”

Roger had skill behind the speed rack. He filled every order in under five minutes. The last drink went to Jamie. He rang the bell again and held his drink aloft.

“A toast,” he said. “To Charlie Boykin, my dearest and oldest friend, home from the wilderness!”

The drunken lot cheered in unison. Jamie raised his hand.

“And to my brother-in-law, Archer Creigh,” he said, “the next mayor of Nashville. To Arch!”

His name echoed off the exposed brick and reclaimed lumber on the walls, and another round of cheers went up. But Arch had already left.

six

I lay awake in my mother’s old room for what felt like hours that night, scrolling through the gauzy, imperfect catalogue of my remembrance, sorting through emotions long repressed, things I’d wanted to forget, because it had seemed easier to push them down and behind me than to make peace with them. This was why I’d left in the first place: I couldn’t reconcile the love and need I had for my mother, for Arch and Vanessa—even for Jim Haltom—with the indignation I’d felt when I discovered that all of our lives had been governed by a grand deception of which only I was unaware. It was easier to cut them out of my life, to behave as if I’d never known them, than to make sense of how I could so desperately love people who thought nothing of lying about things of such great consequence. Had they never considered how it would feel to discover that my very identity, my entire sense of self, was built on a delusion?

But memory doesn’t let go of us. We can no more choose to put away the past than we can cease to breathe and go on living. And yet we try. We persuade ourselves that a new city or a new country, a new job, a new life, a new religion, a new love, will remake us and liberate us from the prisons of our old errors and the wrongs dealt to us, real or perceived. But the old sins and scars always come to reclaim us, whether borne along by memory alone or in the form of a private jet.