The only thing that came close to deterring him was the walk from the mailbox. It stood on the side of Highway 334, about eighty yards from Mary Annie’s mother’s house, where they were living in the early eighties and where Larry’s eldest son lives now. (Larry would build another house on the property, in 1986, and move the family there.) He’d walk out there every afternoon, on days when he wasn’t at the firehouse. Mary Annie grew to hate watching him return, carrying a deadening stack of manila envelopes: his stories, all of them returned to him affixed with form rejection notes, some stories clocking ten, twelve rejections. It sank him every time. He’d walk back slowly, as though studying the gravel.

Until one day he didn’t. One day Larry got an envelope—letter-sized, the right kind—and this time he came up the driveway fast. Easyriders, a magazine for Harley-Davidson riders (and the breast-baring women who love them), was publishing a story of his. First publication carried, for him, an intense and specific type of joy—the ecstasy of validation, as though his passport had been stamped for entry into a new and greener land. (His memory of it, I think, was the source for the grin he gave me, and the dinner invitation, when I revealed I’d just published my own first story: the headwaters of our friendship.)

When the story appeared, in the June 1982 issue, Larry’s mother, Leona, went seeking a copy at an Oxford newsstand. The salesclerk hesitated to hand it to her. One imagines the clerk anxiously scanning the cover, with its pouting, crimped-hair model, the words “evil, wicked, mean, nasty” printed on her tank top, a cover line beside her hip promising “Lotsa Motorcycle Women!” Finally he said: “Mrs. Brown, you’re a nice lady. Why’re you buying this magazine?” I never heard what Leona said back to him, but I suspect it was the same thing the writer Lewis Nordan’s mother exclaimed when she went seeking a story of his in an unfamiliar-to-her magazine called Playgirl: “My son’s in there!” Leona Brown, it bears noting, was a spectacularly proud mother, and Larry often said his mother’s reading habits—family legend says she read every book in the Oxford library—were the seeds of his own. In 1991, he inscribed his second novel, Joe, to her as follows: “For Mama, the most important one … It was a long time coming, but the world sees it now. I know some laughed at my dream but you never did. Thank you for my life. Your loving son, Larry.”