The Liar

By noon she was winding, winding up through the green with her window half down so she could smell the mountains. The pine, the rivers and streams. Here there was no snow. Instead wildflowers sprouted—little stars, drops of color—and the houses and cabins she passed had daffodils springing yellow as fresh butter. Here clothes flapped on lines so the sheets would carry that scent into bedrooms. Hawks circled above in the blue.

“I’m hungry. Mama, Fifi’s hungry. Are we there? Are we there, Mama?”

“Almost, baby.”

“Can we be there now?”

“Almost. You and Fifi can have something to eat at Gamma’s.”

“We want cookies.”

“Maybe.”

She crossed what the locals called Billy’s Creek, named for the boy who’d drowned in it before her father was born, and the dirt road that led down to the holler and to some ramshackle houses and double-wides where hunting dogs bayed in their pens and the shotguns stayed loaded and handy.

And the sign for Mountain Spring Campground, where her brother Forrest had worked one long-ago summer, and where he’d gone skinny-dipping—and a little more—with Emma Kate Addison, a fact Shelby knew as Emma Kate had been her closest friend, diapers through high school.

Now the turn for the hotel/resort built when she was about ten. Her brother Clay worked there, taking tourists out for white-water rafting. He’d met his wife there as she worked as a dessert chef for the hotel. Now Gilly was pregnant with their second child.

But before the wives and the children, before jobs and careers, they’d run tame here.

She’d known the trails and the streams, the swimming holes and the places where the black bear lumbered along. She’d walked with her brothers, with Emma Kate, on hot summer days into town to buy Cokes at the general store, or to her grandmother’s salon to beg for spending money.

She’d known places to sit and look out at forever. How the whippoorwill sounded when dusk fell in clouds of soft, soft gray after the sun died red behind the peaks.

She’d know it again, she thought. All of it. And more important, her daughter would know it. She’d know the giddy feeling of warm grass under her feet, or cold creek water lapping her ankles.

“Please, Mama, please! Can we be there?”

“We’re really close now. See that house there? I knew a girl who lived there. Her name was Lorilee, and her mama, Miz Maybeline, worked for Granny. She still does, and I think Granny told me Lorilee works for her, too. And see, just up ahead, that fork in the road?”

“You eat with a fork.”

“That’s right.” Almost as impatient as her daughter, Shelby laughed. “But it also means a split in the road—where you can go one way or the other? If we went to the right—the hand you color with? If we went that way, we’d be in Rendezvous Ridge in a spit. But we go left . . .”

Her own excitement rising, Shelby took the left fork—a little faster than maybe she should. “And we’re heading home.”

“Gamma’s house.”

“That’s right.”

A few houses, some of them new since she’d left, scattered around—and the road still winding and rising.

Emma Kate’s house, with a big truck in the drive that had The Fix-It Guys painted on the side.

And there it was. Home.

Cars and trucks everywhere, she noted. Packed in the drive, ranged on the side of the road. Kids running around the front yard and dogs with them. And the spring flowers her parents tended like babies already a show at the hem of the pretty two-story house. The cedar shakes gleamed in the sun, and the pink dogwood her mother prized bloomed as pretty as Easter morning.

A banner hung between the front-porch posts.

WELCOME HOME, SHELBY AND CALLIE ROSE!

She might have laid her head on the steering wheel and wept in sheer gratitude, but Callie bounced in her car seat.

“Out! Out! Hurry, Mama.”

She saw another sign propped on a sawhorse right in front of the house.

RESERVED FOR SHELBY

As she let out a laugh, two of the boys spotted her van, ran over cheering.

“We’ll move it, Shelby!”

Her uncle Grady’s boys, who looked to have sprung up another six inches since she’d seen them at Christmas.

“Somebody having a party?” she called out.

“It’s for you. Hey, Callie, hey.” The older of the two—Macon—tapped on Callie’s window.

“Whozat, Mama? Who?”

“That’s your cousin Macon.”

“Cousin Macon!” Callie waved both hands. “Hi, hi!”

She eased the van off the road, and with intense relief, turned off the ignition. “We’re here, Callie. At last.”

“Out, out, out.”

“I’m working on it.”

Before she could get around the van, kids swarming her, to open the side door, her mother came running.

Nearly six feet, Ada Mae had long legs to cover the ground from house to van. Her yellow sundress billowed around those legs, set off her crown of red hair.

Before Shelby could take a breath she was caught in a bear hug and surrounded by the scent of L’Air du Temps, her mother’s signature perfume.