They had been on the road for coming up on two hours and even though they’d had a late breakfast, they were due for a lunch break. When Annie had proposed making sandwiches to eat along the way, Charlie had made the face of a child who’d just been told they were having worms for dinner and asked if they could they stop at a McDonald’s somewhere.

Back in the day, she and John had been organic this, organic that, wheat germ shakes, protein bars. But having a kid changed all that, and before long her child’s tastes became her own, to the point that there were times when she would kill for a Chicken McNugget.

Charlie said he was, indeed, hungry, and so Annie hit the voice command button and asked Sherpa if there was a McDonald’s coming up. The very next exit, she informed Annie. They got off the highway, had something to eat, used the bathrooms, and, after topping up the SUV’s gas tank, were back on the road.

According to Sherpa, they would reach their destination in another two hours.

When Annie turned off a state-maintained road onto a narrower county artery, Sherpa informed her that her destination was less than a mile away. Before reaching it, the car rolled gently over a railroad crossing. The fading round yellow sign, the letters r and r separated by a black x, was acned with what looked like BB-gun shots. She looked in the rearview mirror to see what Charlie was up to, whether he was comatose. She hadn’t heard much out of him the last hour, not since she had turned off the interstate and passed through Castle Creek, which really was little more than a gas station with a convenience store and a couple of churches. Sure enough, he was in dreamland.

“Hey,” she said. “Hey, Charlie. Wake up. We’re almost there.”

Slowly he opened his eyes, took a moment to orient himself, and looked out his window. “Where?”

“Soon.”

She was reading names and numbers off mailboxes. The house she was looking for was 11318 Scoutland Road, and there remained the faded name of one of the previous occupants: smitherton.

She said the numbers out loud as she passed them. “Eleven-two-fifty-eight . . . eleven-two-eighty-six . . . eleven-three-twelve . . . hang on. I think this is it.”

“Why are there boxes beside the road?” Charlie asked.

“Those are mailboxes. You’ve seen those before. In Cape Cod.”

The things you’d assume everyone, even a kid, would know, but when they’d grown up in the city, the country turned out to be full of surprises, even totally mundane ones.

She slowed the car to a crawl and put on her right blinker, spotted a mailbox with 11318, and turned into the driveway.