“Are you sure?” Mirabella was asking for the third or fourth time. “I think we should go over it once more just to be on the safe side. Now, I want to make absolutely sure the ceiling fan switch and the lights are on that side of the cabinet. The intercom-”

“Marybell, honey.” Jimmy Joe’s patient drawl drifted up the stairs. “Come on, now, and leave the man alone. Twenty years in the navy, I think he probably knows how to follow orders.”

“I am not ordering,” said Mirabella.

Up on the ladder, her soon-to-be brother-in-law watched in silent appreciation as she bristled the way only a drop-dead-gorgeous redheaded woman can get away with doing.

“I’m just trying to make it clear, that’s all. After all, we’re not going to be here if he has any questions. I want to be sure-”

Troy grinned and touched his temple in a mocking salute. “Yes, ma‘am, and you can be. Swear t’ God, it’s all up here, and clear as a bell. You two just go on along, have fun in Atlanta, now, y‘hear? By the time you get home Sunday night, it’s gonna be all taken care of. Nothin’ to worry about.’

Mirabella had her hands on her hips and was staring up at him, giving him the look that always reminded him of a little cock robin. He watched it melt into a smile that would have just about knocked him off that ladder if it hadn’t been on the face of the woman who was about to make his baby brother the happiest man on earth.

“Troy, you are a lifesaver to be doing this. With the wedding only a week away, and Charly coming, I just have to get this nursery project finished. I cannot believe that contractor, flaking on me like that. Gets it halfway finished and just…disappears!’

“Well, now, you know, these things happen,” said Troy soothingly. Especially, he admitted to himself, in the South.

“Not to me,” snapped Mirabella, getting that feisty-robin look again.

Jimmy Joe appeared in the doorway with Amy Jo’s carrier seat in one hand and a suitcase in the other, and kind of a harassed look on his face. The look seemed to melt away the moment he set eyes on Mirabella, however, to be replaced by something that could only be described as a glow. It was a phenomenon Troy had observed before, and in a strange way, was beginning to envy.

“Hon, we need to be goin’. J.J.’s out in the car, and Mama’s waitin’ on us over at the house. We don’t want to be hittin’ Atlanta at rush hour.”

“Coming…” Troy noticed that Mirabella’s voice, which was normally California crisp and sort of bossy, had gone all husky and breathless, and that the smile she turned on Jimmy Joe was different from the one she’d dazzled him with. Softer, kind of misty. Then her gaze dropped to the carrier seat where her baby girl, having just recently found out what a terrific source of amusement a tongue could be, was raspberrying merrily away in a puddle of drool. The look on Mirabella’s face was a lot like the glow that had just lit up Jimmy Joe’s. It was almost embarrassing, Troy thought, watching those three together, as if he was intruding on something intensely private, some rare intimacy he could never share.

He waved them off with the screwdriver he was holding. “Go on-get! I never will get this job done if you keep standing around here jawin’ at me. Get out of here, y’all-have a good time. And don’t forget to write.”

Jimmy Joe chuckled and gave him a nod rather than a wave, since his hands were full, as he herded his bride-to-be out of the room. Troy could hear her hollering all the way down the stairs.

“…and we’ll call you with the number where we can be reached as soon as we get to the hotel. Oh, there’s plenty of that chicken left for salad or sandwiches, if you get hungry. Call if you have any questions…”

Troy waited where he was, shaking his head and laughing to himself, until he heard the front door, and a minute or two later the slamming of three car doors, one after the other. Then he put down the screwdriver and climbed off the ladder and went down the stairs and onto the front porch, just in time to watch a silver Lexus pull out onto the main road, spittin’ gravel. He noticed that Mirabella was driving, which surprised him some even though it was her car. In Troy’s experience, professional drivers like his brother Jimmy Joe didn’t usually give up that ol’ wheel to an amateur if they could help it. But then, most drivers didn’t have to deal with Mirabella.

“Bubba,” he said to the chocolate Lab who was just coming up the steps onto the porch, wet and stinking of pond muck, “I do believe my baby brother’s got his hands full…what do you say, old boy? Huh? What do you think?”

Bubba, who at ninety-five pounds was still a puppy and hadn’t figured out yet where he left off and the rest of the world began, was weaving his way ecstatically around and between Troy’s legs and leaving them well smeared with whatever it was he’d just been wallowing in. In spite of that, Troy gave him a good roughhouse and hug, partly to fill the lonely, empty place that always seemed to open up inside him when he watched his brother and his woman and her baby together.

And sometimes for no reason at all. In fact, he’d been having that feeling a lot in the past six months or so, pretty much ever since he’d made the decision to retire from the navy. It seemed all his SEAL training and experience hadn’t done a whole lot to prepare him for what came after that.

“Whoo-ee, you stink,” he said to Bubba. And now, of course, so did he. He gave the dog one last rub and went in to wash himself off. He had a nursery to rewire, and he figured if he tried he could probably stretch the job out to take up the whole weekend. Might as well, he thought. He didn’t have anything better to do.


Charly drove slowly, trying to take in everything at once and at the same time watch where she was going-not that there was any traffic to worry about; that much hadn’t changed. She didn’t know which was the greater wonder to her-the things that were different or the things that, even after twenty years, were still exactly as she remembered them.

She noticed that there was now a great big new Winn-Dixie on the outskirts of town, on a spot where there’d been nothing but a whole bunch of trees half buried in kudzu and a curb market that used to sell fresh honey, peanuts boiled or roasted and peaches and tomatoes and watermelons in their proper season. And praise the Lord, fast food had found its way to Mourning Spring! Both a Burger King and a KFC appeared to be flourishing, cunningly planted as they were, across the street from the high school.

But there was B.B.’s Barn, better known in Charly’s day as the Beer and Boogie, just as tacky as ever, still standing alone at the edge of town like the village outcast, with only the equally trashy Mourning-or Moanin’, as it was locally pronounced, with an implied snicker-Springs Motel across the road for company. And the big old redbrick and white frame Victorian houses on Main Street looked just the same, although Charly noticed that a few now had quaint, handcrafty signs like The Good Mourning Bed And Breakfast, and Mourning Glory Inn planted in beds of geraniums on their front lawns.

The butterflies in her stomach didn’t start in earnest, though, until she drove onto the courthouse square. It was still as pretty and quaint as she remembered, like something Norman Rockwell might paint, shaded by big old oak trees, with the white bandstand in the middle looking like something that belonged on the top of a wedding cake. And yes, there was still the blatantly phallic Confederate Memorial, rising out of the flower beds at the far end. And judging from the petunias and day lilies and the baskets of impatiens and ferns cascading from every light pole and street sign, the town’s two rival garden clubs were still trying hard to out-green-thumb one another.

Charly considered that pretty amazing. She’d have thought surely most of the old biddies would have died off by now.

Twice she drove past the redbrick courthouse with its imposing white columns, her heart pounding. Would he be there now? she wondered. It was after hours, but he’d often worked late in his office behind the second-floor courtroom, the one with the window that looked out toward the mountains, not down on the square. In the winter when the leaves were off the trees and the darkness came early, she’d been able to look out her own bedroom window and see the light shining in his.

Naw, she told herself, taking a deep, restorative breath. He wouldn’t be there. For all she knew, he might even have retired by now.

On her second pass around the square, Charly aimed the Taurus into one of the head-in parking places that faced the park and turned off the engine. Her palms were sweaty and her mouth was dry, and she had an idea that when she tried standing on them, her legs were going to be wobbly.

She was having major second thoughts about this whole thing. She’d been truly crazy to come. It was a bad idea. Foolish, at least.

But she’d done it, she was here and how was she going to face herself in the mirror if she didn’t go through with it now? It simply wasn’t in her to turn around and drive away without doing what she’d come here to do. Not after all this. She’d come too far, and not just in miles. She had to finish it. She owed herself that much… the closure, at least.

But before she faced him, she had to settle her emotions down. She was going to have to be calm, cool and adult about this. She couldn’t let him sense her vulnerability. She knew him. If she did, he’d go straight for the jugular.

Charly got out of the car and locked it after her-a habit born of living her entire adult life in L.A.-and then stood for a moment gazing in bemusement at the restaurant on the corner across the street. The sign above it still said Coffee Shop, in the same two-foot-high red plastic letters she remembered from twenty years ago. But in her day the smaller, hand-painted sign hanging in the big front window had said Dottie’s Diner. Now, in the identical style, it said Kelly’s Kitchen instead.