They passed more billboards for boat rentals, eighteen-hole championship golf, fried fish shacks, and souvenir stores. TJ just figuring the road would lead them to where they needed to go, handing it over to the Lord for the direction although she hadn’t been to a church service since her momma and Chester Pratt dragged her to the new Baptist church out by the Rebel Truck Stop. The road curved up onto a big concrete bridge until she could finally see water, lit up from the streetlamps with signs to places called Kahuna Bay and Salty Dog Marina. More cheap hotels and a big old paddle wheeler like they docked up on the Mississippi River. TJ kept on driving and curving, feeling like she was headed right, but then she was lost, the lights of the lake a distant memory until she hit a long stretch of a country road with old barns and silos, now scared she’d missed the damn lake. The gas gauge in the red and they didn’t have but five dollars left between them.

“Where are we?” John Wesley said.

TJ couldn’t see in the full dark, turning off the main road by a wide-open pasture, following the white horse fence and hoping maybe she could just feel her way back to the water and all the promise she hoped they’d find. Soon she spotted a sign to some kind of new development and she looked in the rearview at her little brother, his face lit up like it did at the Chuck E. Cheese in Tupelo.

“What’s it like?”

“What’s that?”

“That nice house.”

“Well,” TJ said. “I ain’t too sure.”

“It’s a big house,” Holly said. “Bigger than you ever been in, kid.”

Holly leaned forward, God bless her, and pointed to where the road forked by a big realty sign. price reduced. foreclosure. bank-owned lakefront luxury. They wound up and around the hill until they saw an entrance with two tall brick pilings. A fancy hand-carved wood sign said firefly.

“You sure?” TJ asked.

“Uh-huh.”

TJ turned the wheel and headed up the gravel road, letting down her driver’s window so she could see where they were going. Soon they saw the outline of one of the biggest houses she’d ever seen in her life, with a tile roof and stucco walls and plenty of no trespass signs posted on skinny oaks along a fence line. The house was dark, weeds grown up along the drive and knee-deep up to big front steps. She pulled off the drive and into a thicket of little trees and shut off the engine. John Wesley hopped out fast as Ladarius came awake with a start, looking like a man who’d been free-falling in dreamland, snoring and kicking and then turning to TJ to get hold of himself.

“Welcome home.”

“You crazy?” he said. “This place got to be wired up out the ass.”