Before she knew it, she was on the bridge over Buzzards Bay that didn’t seem nearly as high over the canal as it used to. She saw signs for towns like Osterville and Sandwich, towns that meant nothing to her because her family had only ever cared about the Outer Cape, where the peninsula was chewed away to a resilient sliver of sandy earth. Poppy couldn’t wait to get past Hyannis, where Ann had once sworn she saw John F. Kennedy, Jr., in Ray-Bans pumping gas into his convertible at the Mobil station. The real turning point came when she went through the rotary at Orleans, just past the elbow of the Cape. After Orleans, she could see salt ponds and marshes instead of scrub pine, and she began to feel that magic tingling of anticipation again. Driving past all these towns made her feel like she was driving through time, not to a place, but to her past. The Lobster Shanty, National Seashore Museum, Audubon Center, mini-golf barn, and drive-in movie theater were still there, although now there were Mexican, African, and Thai restaurants. Since when could you buy ethnic food on the Cape? What other changes should she brace herself for?

She wasn’t ready to experience the house yet, and the flood of emotion she knew was waiting for her there, so she pulled into the parking lot in front of the General Store and went inside. Even that had changed. It had been remodeled. Now you could buy kombucha and six-dollar smoothies. She missed the General Store she remembered, where you could enter in your bare feet. The floors were never swept, doughnuts were fifty cents, and she and Ann would use their paltry allowance to buy Mad Libs and quiz books with invisible-ink pens while her parents bought The New York Times.

She went into the liquor store, quaintly called the “package store” in New England, or “packie,” as her dad had called it. She bought a six-pack of beer that cost more than ten bucks, the most obvious sign she wasn’t in Milwaukee anymore, where beer was practically free.

Across the street was a fancy boulangerie where there’d once been a clam shack. A boulangerie in South Wellfleet?

She got back into her car and drove to the long dirt drive that led to her family’s house and came to a stop in the clearing. Poppy had never been to the Cape this early in the season, and she found the landscape strangely lush from rain, not dry and brown the way she remembered it. This time of year, mist rose from the lawn instead of dust. She parked next to the old barn her father had converted into a workshop and looked between the clusters of scrub pines on the bluff. In the distance, she could see the expanse of flat brown silt in Drummer Cove and wondered if arriving at low tide was a bad omen.