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“That’s wild.”

“Pretty crazy, right?”

Randy taps his pencil on the table. “So you don’t get over it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Like my mom. I always wonder if I ever will.”

We sit in silence awhile. I check the clock; Jack should be home by now. In a way, I’m glad he’s late. It gives me a chance to ask Randy more questions. It’s not often I talk with kids my Joe’s age. When I see his old classmates in the Pharmacy or around town, it’s always a little awkward—I guess they can see the sadness in me.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” I ask Randy.

He smiles. “Her name is Tawny.”

“She must be pretty.”

“How do you know?”

“Tawny’s a pretty girl’s name.”

“You’re right about that. She’s got black hair and brown eyes. A lot of people say we look alike, but I don’t see it. As soon as I graduate, we’ll get murried. I really want to get murried.”

“Why?”

“I love her.”

“Besides loving her, why would you get married so young?”

“Well, the way I see it, you never know how much time you got. You might think you got a lot, but I don’t believe you can count on that. I think you sort of have to do things that you want to do, because maybe the chance won’t come around again. You don’t think I ought to get murried, though?”

“It seems to me that you like what you’re studying. Maybe you can think about getting an advanced degree. The kids who stay in these parts after they’ve gotten an education really matter. They give back. That’s important.”

“I guess so. But I can do that and get murried. Do you have any other children?” he asks.

It’s funny. I’d removed all the silly pictures of Etta from the refrigerator door when I was trying not to dwell so much on her absence. I surely meant to put them back, but I haven’t yet. There are formal pictures in the living room, in polished silver frames, but none in the kitchen, the true center of our home. I’ll have to work on that, I think. I jump up. “Yes, I have a daughter, Etta. She just got married in Italy a few months ago.” I go to the living room, fetch a wedding picture with all of us in it, and return to the kitchen. “Here she is.” I hand him the picture.

“She sure is pretty. She don’t look very old.”

“Nineteen, almost twenty.”

“Is that why you’re against young marriage?”

“Partly.” I smile. “I just think it’s a good idea to wait. You can be more certain of your feelings if you grow up a little more and have a few more life experiences. Then again, I’m starting to realize that this may be the right thing for her and that I need to trust her judgment.”

“Ave? I’m home,” Jack hollers from the front of the house.

“Back here, honey.”

“I hope you don’t mind, I brought company…” Jack walks into the kitchen, Tyler right behind him.

“Of course not. I have company too.”

Jack smiles. “Randy, you back to cause more trouble?”

“Yes, sir, I hope so.”

Randy stands and extends his hand to Tyler. “Hi, I’m Randy Galloway.”

“Randy goes to Berea. Studies horticulture,” I explain.

“That’s interesting. You gonna be a botanist?” Tyler wants to know.

“I hope so. That is, if there’s any woods left by the time I graduate.”

I intervene, saying, “Randy, you have to be careful what you say. Tyler is one of the owners of the Bituminous Reserves, Inc. They mine coal using mountaintop removal.”

“Wow,” Randy responds. “I never met management before. You guys are the enemy we fight every morning when we go out into the forest to document the herbs.”

Tyler laughs awkwardly. “I don’t like to be called the enemy.”

“Why do you do it?” Randy asks earnestly.

“I’m a businessman.”

“There has to be a better answer than that,” Randy says.

“Now, Randy,” I say.

Tyler puts up his hand. “That’s okay, Ave Maria. Randy, tell me, what would you do if you were me?”

“Well, I sure wouldn’t wreck the terrain of a mountain range that is thousands of years old, just for a few years of coal. I’d capitalize on nature’s riches in a way that would sustain it. I’d come up with a business plan to do what I’m doing on a larger scale. Why shouldn’t the herbs needed to make medicine come from our forests? Most pharmaceutical companies go down to the rain forest in the Southern Hemisphere, but we got a lot of herbs right here.”

“Some folks have tried that. It’s not as easy as it sounds,” Tyler tells him in a tone so reassuring, I see why Jack has been won over. Tyler Hutchinson is soothing and in control at the same time. A good salesman.

Randy’s not buying, though. “It seems to me, if you don’t value the land and what it produces, it just lays the world open to be destroyed.”

“Coal is made in the earth,” Tyler says.

“Yes, and we need the coal. I’m not saying that we don’t. But why would we ruin nature for short-term energy? It doesn’t make any sense. We need these forests too—they’re a treasure, really. Even if they exist just to make oxygen. That’s a huge thing. We’ve got to trust nature to know something that maybe humanity doesn’t.”

“I appreciate your point of view, Randy,” says Tyler, gracious on the surface.

I look at Jack, hoping he caught how dismissive Tyler has been with Randy, but Jack is busy cutting squares into the pan of lasagna he pulled from the oven. Sometimes I’d like to hit Jack over the head with a brick to wake him up.

“Jack, can you handle lunch from here? I have to get to work,” I say. “Randy, it was nice to get to know you a bit better. Do you think you can find your way back when you’re done with lunch?”

“Oh, easy, ma’am. I parked at the high school. I’ll just hike down.”

“Or Jack can take you.”

Randy stands and shakes my hand. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

“You’re entirely welcome.”

As Jack and Tyler resume their conversation, I motion with a jab to Randy to stick it to Tyler. He smiles and gives me the thumbs-up.

I begin my e-mail exchange with Rosalind Stoneman of Aberdeen as though I am communicating with someone who speaks a foreign language instead of just being from a foreign country. We quickly adapt to each other’s use of the English language. Her sense of humor comes through her idioms (my favorite so far: she and her husband are like “chalk and cheese”—in other words, total opposites), and I hope she gets mine (saying “bless your heart” can mean “drop dead” in these parts).

We have lots of questions for each other, but somehow, on top of both of our lists is what kind of clothes to bring for our husbands. I pictured an erudite, dashing playwright in Donald, but his wife assured me that he is more the farmer type. Her only sartorial advice for me was to bring wellies and lots of warm sweaters. She and Donald love their drafty old house, but we might not be used to it. (Wait till she has her first night in Cracker’s Neck. I’ll remind Jack to leave lots of firewood!)

I have always loved being a pharmacist, and yet it’s never been hard for me to take time away from my job. While it’s interesting to study medicine and to keep current with all the latest pharmaceuticals, that part of my profession is the least compelling to me. I love serving the customers, hearing their stories, and hopefully, making them feel a little better. I still enjoy going into customers’ homes when I make deliveries because I’m fascinated by how people choose to live.

For example, when I deliver out in the Valley to Susan Gibson, I notice that her furniture and knickknacks have not varied in forty years. The house is always as neat as a pin, but not one detail has changed. She has a pale green ceramic frog that sits on the windowsill, and it has sat there, in the same spot, since I was a girl. I used to go on delivery runs with Fred Mulligan—I guess he liked the company, though he never said much to me. I’d spend a lot of time reading in the car, unless he invited me to go inside. I knew that when we delivered to Miss Gibson, we were near the end of the route. Sometimes Fred would have me run the delivery to the door without him. I had favorite customers, and they made me feel special. Whenever I delivered to Mrs. Little on West Second Street, she’d have two Nilla wafers and a glass of milk waiting for me.

Time has helped mellow my memories of Fred Mulligan. I even call him Dad, occasionally, when I refer to him. For a long time, I called him Fred Mulligan, as detached as you can get. I’ve now known my own papa, Mario, for almost as long as I knew Fred. I wish I could have foretold, when I was a girl, how my story would play out. It would have given me great comfort to know that eventually, my heart would be filled by the love of a true father. I wasn’t able to have it with Fred. Maybe, had I been a boy, things would have been different. There is no harder work in the world than trying to get someone to like you, and this was my eternal mission with Fred. Though he knew I wanted him to like me, it was the one thing he withheld.

It wasn’t all awful, but as with all childhood sadness carried forward, the past puts a veil over adulthood, a dull achy feeling of guilt, sometimes outright melancholy and sometimes shame for unnamed feelings. The combination of these emotions and juggling them always left me tired. They interfere with the now, which is why I stopped the habit of going back and blaming myself for things that can’t be changed. And while I don’t forget events altogether, the details have become murky, some disappearing altogether (hallelujah). That’s one of the comforts of getting older: the sharp edges wear away, and one is left with a practical view of things. Emotions are for the present; don’t squander them on past hurts that are a waste of time. I learned that from Mario, who showed me how to start over again.

But without Fred Mulligan’s influence, I wouldn’t have survived small-town life. He’s the one who showed me by example that things are not always what they seem. He showed me on the old delivery route that even when a home and the family inside seemed perfect, you could always count on the fact that there was a lot going on behind closed doors—plenty of secrets, mysteries, and reinvented histories. “Every family is its own country,” he’d say. Fred Mulligan was right.

I pull in to Glencoe Cemetery, past the fountain—dry in winter—and up to the hillside where my mother and dad are buried. I get out of the Jeep and climb the hill. There’s a small bouquet of posies on Mama’s grave that I did not leave. I remove the Christmas wreaths from the headstones. I pick up the posies and see that on one of the long, thin satin ribbons,
M.B.
is printed in ink. My papa left these for my mother.

I can’t express how much I miss my mother. Time hasn’t helped one bit with this loss. I have tremendous guilt, though I know it’s not quite rational, that I couldn’t do more to save her life. Sometimes I replay her illness over in my mind and imagine whisking her off to a fancy hospital somewhere in a faraway city where they had the cure. In that fantasy, she is still with me. What a dream!

I think of all the things we didn’t do, the trip we were to take to Italy but never did. Why didn’t I make her go? I backed down too easily. I let her go back into her cocoon for no good reason. I should have fought her on that—then, at least, she would have seen her sisters before she died. She would have been able to go home one more time. I understand, just a little, that I was her home, and as long as I stayed close, she was happy. But, like all daughters, I wanted more for her. Alas, I wasn’t able to deliver it.

I make the sign of the cross and say a prayer.

I take the two dried-out wreaths over to the garbage can by the fence. There’s a new grave, with large arrangements of pink, yellow, white, and red flowers thrown haphazardly over the freshly dug dirt. It looks like a big, beat-up birthday cake, with the bright ribbons and foil tribute letters whipping in the wind. I don’t remember Fleeta telling me of a recent death. The grave is in the Horton plot. Good family, the Hortons.

I walk back to my mother and father’s grave, and as I go back down the hill, I stop at the Goins family plot. The Goins family had, as two of its members, the prettiest girls in town, Cathy and Gail, though they’ve since grown up and moved away. Recently, one of their relatives died, and everybody told me that I had to come up and see the headstone, because I wouldn’t believe it. I look down, and now I know what all the fuss is about. It says:

Goins Goins Gone

I laugh loud. Wait until Jack sees this—it’s his kind of humor. It takes a big person to laugh at death, and an even bigger one to laugh after death.

Aberdeen

“N
ow, look here,” Iva Lou says as she takes the curves of the road to Tri-Cities Airport with too much firepower to suit me. “I like a tartan plaid with navy blue, kelly green, yeller, and black. I got me a beret with a kelly-green grosgrain ribbon, and I want my kilt to pick up that hint.”

“You got it.” I turn and look at my husband in the backseat. “Jack, you’ll help me remember, won’t you?”

“Yep.”

“I always wanted a genu-ine kilt from Scotland,” says Iva Lou. “You are the first folks I ever knew that went.”

“Isn’t that odd, when practically everybody who lives here is of Scottish descent?”

“And Irish. Don’t forget that.”

“Granted, it took me thirty-six years to get to Italy, but it was always a goal,” I say.

“Honey-o, look at me. I’m Scots-Irish, and I went to It-lee instead. ’Course, I felt I already knew about my own roots. I wanted to experience the historical elements of Italy.”

“You mean the men,” Jack pipes up.

“Them too. Everybody knows my ideal man, in theory, is Mario Lanza. Even Lyle knows it. Mario Lanza with the singing—and without the drinkin’. I can’t stand a tosser; a man who can’t hold his liquor ruins a nice night out. And you know I like my nights out.”

“You have your standards,” I say.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Iva Lou and I have made a real effort to get our friendship back on track. We started slowly—to resume our old routine quickly would have felt phony. Sometimes she stops by for lunch, or we run up to the Mexican restaurant at the Wal-Mart plaza for dinner. She and I go to Garden Club together. Last week we went to a computer seminar at Mountain Empire Community College, where we were like two kids, whispering and giggling during class. We never refer to our estrangement; this is her choice, and I take my cues from Iva Lou: “What’s past is passed.”

“I was telling Lovely my theories about men and drinkin’ the other night. One of her friends has a husband who’s a little too enamored of Captain Morgan rum. I told her to put her foot down now, before the problem gits so bad she has to put 911 on the speed dial.”

It’s so funny—a year ago, I had never heard of Lovely Carter, and now she’s a part of our world, as though she has always been here. Iva Lou shares that their relationship is nowhere near perfect—that things come up all the time for Lovely, emotionally speaking, and Iva Lou has to deal with them. Just lately, Lovely has allowed her girls to stay overnight at the trailer. The girls begged and begged, and finally, Lovely let them. Well, the girls had a ball, and now they come over much more often. “Me and Lovely are friends,” Iva Lou told me, “and if it gets to be more than that, if we start feeling like family to each other, then that’ll be fine too.”

Jack taps me on the shoulder. “Did you remember my work boots?”

“Do what?”

“My work boots. Did you pack them?”

“Do what?”

“Stop it, Ave.”

Iva Lou, Jack, and I laugh. “Do what?” is Big Stone Gap speak for “What did you ask me?” It was one of the local expressions I shared in an e-mail with Rosalind Stoneman. She didn’t get it, and I told her, “Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it once you’re in the holler.”

“I did pack your work boots, honey.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re a good wife.” Iva Lou adjusts the rearview mirror. “You’d be a better one if you taught your husband to pack his own damn boots.”

“Too late for that,” I tell her.

Just then Iva Lou skids to a stop in front of the airport terminal. Jack jumps out and starts unloading bags from the trunk.

“Thank you for driving us over,” I say, giving Iva Lou a hug.

“Have the time of yer life.” Iva Lou smiles. “Take lots of pictures. And if you see any Wades or Makinses over there, you just tell ’em we said hi-dee.”

I laugh. “Will do.”

Jack puts the bags on the sidewalk and comes around the car. He gives Iva Lou a hug too. “Glad you two girls worked things out,” he says.

“Listen here, Jack Mac. I either had to make up with her or kill her, and I know you need her, so I opted for Plan A.”

He grins. “I appreciate it.”

We wave as Iva Lou drives off, then take our bags inside and check in. “I’m going to get some magazines,” I tell Jack.

The gift shop at Tri-Cities Airport is stocked with local delicacies as well as newspapers, magazines, and Nabs. You can buy a small crate of apple butter, quilted oven mitts, or soy candles made in local kitchens by local craftsmen.

“Avuh Marie?”

I look to the cash register. “Sweet Sue, what are you doing here?”

“I moved to Kingsport. The divorce came final, and I needed a change.” Sweet Sue reaches up and tightens her ponytail, hoisted high in a rubber band on her head. She wears white pants, a white blouse, and a forest-green apron with a patch that says
RUNWAY GIFT SHOPPE
.

Every divorcée from Big Stone Gap eventually winds up in Kingsport. It’s where you go when you’re ready to start writing anew on your clean slate. It’s our version of relocating to the other side of the moon when we need space from the gossip, custody battles, and pressures that arise from love gone wrong. Big Stone Gap can shrink to the size of a dime when you’re the talk of the town. Better to shove off to sprawling Kingsport when the going gets tough.

I haven’t seen Sweet Sue since the cast party for
The Sound of Music;
I’ve been busy, and evidently, so has she. “How are you doing?” I ask.

“Well, Avuh, let me just say this. I never thought I’d be this old and on the market again. I figgered Mike and me were till death do us part. Of course, for me, the death part never meant murder, but I got so mad at him, I didn’t rule out any possibility. He cheated on me, you know.”

“No, I didn’t,” I lie.

“On…me! Can you believe it?”

“Not really.” It’s amazing to me that Sweet Sue, at our age, still believes she’s a viable, hot number. Wasn’t being homecoming queen, Key Club Sweetheart, Miss Powell Valley, and third runner-up in the Miss Wise County beauty pageant, back when we were young, enough for her?

“When he cheated, well, that’s when I left. I’ll put up with a lot—and trust me, I did—but I ain’t gonna be second fiddle to nobody.”

“I heard you bounced back after Mike. Weren’t you dating Greg Mullins from out in the valley?”

“Oh God, A-vuh, he was about a hundred years old.”

“I thought he was seventy.”

“His shoes might have been seventy, but the rest of him was a hundred. No, next time I belly up to the bar, I want me a younger man. They’re not so set in their ways, you know.”

“I’ve heard that. Well, good for you.”

“Ave?” Jack stands in the entrance of the gift shop.

I turn and motion to him to come in. “Sweet Sue has relocated to Kingsport.”

“Hi, Jack.” Sweet Sue waves at him, ruffling her fingers.

“Hi, Sue.”

My husband stands in the entrance as though there are invisible lasers across the doorway that might fry him if he sets foot in the gift shop. God bless him, whenever he runs into his old girlfriends, it’s like he’s trying to swim upstream fully clothed in a shallow creek. “Honey, we need to hurry,” he tells me.

“I’ll be right there.” I grab a couple of magazines. Sweet Sue rings them up.

“You hang on to him,” she says quietly.

“I’ll do that.”

I meet Jack in the main area of the terminal. “You were rude to her,” I tell him as we go through security.

“I have a wife.”

“I know that.” Sometimes I think Jack’s medication makes him loopy.

Jack shakes his head. “She’s a flirt.”

“Still?”

“Uh-huh. She left a message on my cell phone at Christmas. Needed someone to come over and do a little maintenance work on her house before she sold it in the divorce. Said she needed my ‘expertise.’ Well, I wanted no part of it.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “I was nice to her!”

“You don’t have anything to worry about, darling,” my husband promises me.

When I made our reservations, I chose to fly to Glasgow International Airport via JFK in New York. I chose it for two very important reasons: a cross-country train ride from Glasgow to Aberdeen would allow us to enjoy more of the Scottish countryside, and I wanted to see Pearl Grimes Bakagese on our layover at JFK. Her new house in Garden City is a quick drive from the airport, and she offered to meet us for the hour or two between flights.

When we get off the plane, Pearl waves from behind security. “Ave Maria!”

I wave back. Tears come to my eyes as I remember when she was a girl and how hard her life was. She used her intelligence and drive to build a better life for herself and her mother. Better? How about an excellent life? It’s rich and full. Pearl is educated, working, and now a wife and mother. She has come a long way from Insko Holler.

“Welcome to New York!” Pearl gives me a hug, and then Jack embraces her. “You look great, Jack.”

“So do you, honey.”

Pearl is trim, in a navy blue suit. She wears sneakers and socks with the suit. “Ignore the shoes,” she tells us. “It’s a New York thing. All the working girls, me included, carry pumps in a sack.”

“You have to do a lot of walking.”

“Yep. It’s not like back home, in and out of the car all day. I hardly ever see a car. I take a train in to the city to work, and so does Taye.” Pearl puts her arm around me as we walk inside the terminal. “Mama sends her love to you. She’s watching India.”

“Give her my love! I can’t believe India’s five years old.”

“Neither can I. We’re working on number two now.”

“Good for you.”

“I don’t know how we can top her, though.”

“You don’t think you will, but each child is so different.” Pearl remembers Joe, and I know what she’s thinking. “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine!” I tell her.

“I worry about everything.”

“That’s motherhood. I wish I could tell you that you’ll worry less as time goes on, but I’d be lying.”

We catch up on all her news, and then Pearl wants to hear about home, so I pull some pictures from Christmas out of my purse.

“Someday I want to come home,” Pearl says as she looks at a picture of Cracker’s Neck Holler covered in snow. “We’ve been lucky. We’ve seen a lot of the world. But I miss those mountains.”

I sleep most of the flight over, while Jack stays awake, too excited to sleep. He pores over his travel book and finishes the novel by Ian Rankin (star of Scottish fiction) that he started reading back home. I know Jack loves our trips to Italy and considers it his second home, but the truth is, his own true homeland is Scotland.

It’s dark when we land in Glasgow. We pick up our bags and take a taxi to One Devonshire Gardens. It’s hard to see much as we speed through the hills in the dark. A dense fog covers the city, a mysterious gray mist that reminds me of the old Miss Marple movies they used to show at the Trail Theatre back home. Miss Marple was a doddering old detective who cracked cases with common sense, putting clues together in her rocking chair by the hearth. Very English.

One Devonshire Gardens is a hotel in a series of connected Victorian town houses. When we enter the main lobby, the building reminds me of a stately home, with its crown moldings, flagstone floors, and portrait gallery (some of the paintings must be ten feet tall). The grand staircase that leads to the second floor is made of cherrywood inlaid on walnut. Jack can’t resist and goes to the carvings on the banister to feel the grooves of the wood. He is beyond impressed with the craftsmanship.

The furniture, a combination of eighteenth-century hunting lodge and Victorian, is covered in ocher, deep brown, and beige velvets and faded navy blue matelassé. There are small tea tables situated by the windows, overlooking a garden in the back. An enormous ornate mirror hangs over the deep fireplace. The mantel is decorated with a series of small hunting lamps, all lit.

“This is fancy,” observes my husband.

“The Stonemans’ recommendation,” I tell him.

We check in and are escorted to our room. As the valet explains the features of the hotel, I have to listen closely. The Scottish accent takes some getting used to—it’s lovely, but they speak at a clip. We are fascinated, though, because there are similarities between the accent here and our mountain one. Jack and I unpack very little. We are exhausted from the flight and plan on getting right to sleep. I put my husband’s Dopp kit in the bathroom. When I return to the room, he is standing at the window, looking at the sky. “What is it?” I ask him.

“Come here. There’s a hole in the fog.”

I look up at the sky. The clouds seem to have been ripped apart at the seams to let the moon shine through. It glitters like a whiskey diamond. “A golden moon.”

“I’ve never seen one.” Jack smiles and puts his arms around me. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For making this happen. I never thought it would.”

“Hey, that’s what I’m here for. I’m supposed to help you make your dreams come true.”

“What about you?”

“I have my dream.”

“You do?”