knew it was only a matter of time until he couldn’t do this anymore, and unlike his father, he didn’t have a son to whom he could turn the business over. When he retired, Kaddy’s would be gone.
That brought a small laugh from his thick frame, and as he stepped into the store he winked at Cadbury. The scarecrow offered its toothless grin in response from its spot in the corner. Artie was acting as if the absence of his store would have some kind of lasting impact on Adelia. The town, though, would do just fine; it would remain long after someone else had filled this prime piece of real estate.
Before he could shut the door, he caught sight of movement on the newly paved road. A pickup was taking the steep part of the hill, heading toward the Baxter place. He watched until it hit the flat and swung into the driveway, disappearing behind one of the ancient maples to take its place in the line of vehicles belonging to the rest of the vigil keepers. He supposed that was something he had in common with the oldest family in Adelia. Long after Sal was gone, the Baxter clan would still be there.
As the door shut behind him, he found himself wondering if Sal’s death would finally bring CJ back.
Franklin, Tennessee
CJ Baxter, more than seven hundred miles away, was in the middle of a very pleasant dream. In it, he was reading a chapter from one of his books to an audience of fans and critics. He was onstage in Greensboro’s Carolina Theater, which was too large a venue for the size of one of CJ’s real audiences (he’d read there more than once, and the auditorium was never more than half-full), but his dream allowed for a packed house. And because this was a dream, the audience was divided neatly in two, with the critics to his left, and his fans, the ones who actually enjoyed his books, on the right. The house lights were up, but for some reason there was a spotlight on him, and he was sweating. He took a sip from the glass of water on the podium and then cleared his throat.
He was reading chapter seven from his latest novel, The Buffalo Hunter. Now a few months separated from the book’s release, CJ realized that while The Buffalo Hunter wasn’t a horrible title, he should have acquiesced to his editor, who understood that the name would not sit well with those of his readership who were accustomed to titles that lent themselves to some kind of symbolism, or at least titles that weren’t too spot-on in describing the protagonist.
Nonetheless, the book itself was good—probably the best he’d written. And he was particularly proud of the seventh chapter. In it the protagonist, a man more analogous to the lower half of Appalachia than to Upstate New York— where most of his novels, including this one, were set—found the body of his daughter. She’d been murdered, her tiny body left in the rustic cabin he kept on the river. It was the inciting moment, and there was some critical banter as to its position in the story. CJ had placed it late, muddying the start of the second act, and that decision had cost him some points with the critics. But like much of the criticism he received, CJ weighed this against his belief that the moment happened when it happened, and who was he to argue against it?
As he read, there was a part of him that remained aware of the effect he was having on his audience. He thought that any writer who had participated in enough of these sorts of things learned it was more than a matter of reading the text. The writer had to feel the way the audience was responding to the reading—had to engage in some symbiotic give-and-take, a feeding off of each other’s energy. Of course, that was only if the writer was at all interested in the event becoming something more than killing time for the audience; and with the sheer number of things competing for a writer’s attention, those instances were infrequent.
Tonight, though, CJ could feel it. As he read, he could intuit the ebb and flow of emotional resonance in the house, how the audience reacted to each word he said. He felt good as he moved through the story, and knew that he was connecting with them. And while he couldn’t lift