go to a drive-in for burgers. You can wear what you have on. You don’t have to talk to one soul if you don’t want to. I’ll take care of everything. I’ve been lots of times. Even to Atlanta. Asheville’s nothing. Look, if we’re gonna get married, ya might as well start gettin’ out in tha world a bit. Spread those long wings of yours.”
She nodded. If nothing else, to see the mountains.
He continued. “It’s a two-day job, so we’ll have to stay overnight. In a casual place. You know, a small motel. It’s okay, because we’re adults.”
“Oh,” was all she said. Then whispered, “I see.”
* * *
• • •
KYA HAD NEVER driven up the road a piece, so, a few days later, as she and Chase rode west out of Barkley in his pickup, she stared out the window, holding on to the seat with both hands. The road wound through miles of saw grass and palmettos, leaving the sea in the rear window.
For more than an hour, the familiar reaches of grass and waterways slipped by the truck’s window. Kya identified marsh wrens and egrets, comforted by the sameness, like she hadn’t left home but brought it with her.
Then abruptly, at a line drawn across the earth, the marsh meadows ended, and dusty ground—hacked raw, fenced into squares, and furrowed into rows—spread before them. Fields of paraplegic snags stood in felled forests. Poles, strung with wires, trudged toward the horizon. Of course, she knew coastal marsh didn’t cover the globe, but she’d never been beyond it. What had people done to the land? Every house, the same shoebox shape, squatted on sheared lawn. A flock of pink flamingos fed across a yard, but when Kya whirled in surprise, she saw they were plastic. The deer, cement. The only ducks flew painted on mailboxes.
“They’re incredible, huh?” Chase said.
“What?”
“The houses. You’ve never seen anything like ’em, huh?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Hours later, out on the flatlands of the Piedmont, she saw the Appalachians sketched in gentle blue lines along the horizon. As they neared, peaks rose around them and forested mountains flowed softly into the distance as far as Kya could see.
Clouds lazed in the folded arms of the hills, then billowed up and drifted away. Some tendrils twisted into tight spirals and traced the warmer ravines, behaving like mist tracking the dank fens of the marsh. The same game of physics playing on a different field of biology.
Kya was of the low country, a land of horizons, where the sun set and the moon rose on time. But here, where the topography was a jumble, the sun balanced along the summits, setting behind a ridge one moment and then popping up again when Chase’s truck ascended the next rise. In the mountains, she noticed, the time of sunset depended on where you stood on the hill.
She wondered where her grandpa’s land was. Maybe her kin had kept pigs in a weather-grayed barn like the one she saw in a meadow, creek running by. A family that should have been hers once toiled, laughed, and cried in this landscape. Some would still be here, scattered through the county. Anonymous.
The road became a four-lane highway, and Kya held on tight as Chase’s truck sped within feet of other fast-moving vehicles. He turned onto a curving roadway that rose magically into the air and led them toward the town. “A cloverleaf exit,” he said proudly.
Enormous buildings, eight and ten stories high, stood against the outline of the mountains. Scores of cars scuttled like sand crabs, and there were so many people on the sidewalks, Kya pushed her face to the window, searching their faces, thinking surely Ma and Pa must be among them. One boy, tanned and dark-haired, running down the sidewalk, looked like Jodie, and she spun around to watch him. Her brother would be grown now, of course, but she tracked the boy until they turned a corner.
On the other side of town, Chase booked them into a motel out Hog Mountain Road, a single-story row of brown rooms, lit up by neon lights the shape of palm trees, of all things.
After Chase unlocked their door, she stepped into a room that seemed clean enough but reeked of Pine-Sol and was furnished in America cheap: fake-panel walls, sagging bed with a nickel vibrator machine, and a black-and-white TV secured to the table with an impossibly large chain and padlock. The bedspreads were lime green, the carpet orange shag. Kya’s mind went back