made it, become more than anyone imagined. That she was more than just a pretty face, someone who worried about her manicure but not her grade point average. A girl, really, who had thought New York City would be the cure for all that ailed her, and that in that giant city she had finally found the person she was meant to be, not one who had been manufactured like a store mannequin.
Okay, so she’d been blinded by the stars in her eyes. The Meri Prescott who had left Stone Gap with a tiara and a plan was not the Meri Prescott who was returning. Not by a long shot. And she wasn’t so sure Stone Gap was ready to accept the woman she had become.
Frankly, she didn’t give a damn either way. She was here for Grandpa Ray, for as long as he needed her. To help him, and in the process...help herself.
Her fingers drifted to her cheek, to the long, curved scar that had yet to fade, a constant memory of the division between her past and her present. There were nights when she woke up in a cold sweat, reliving the attack outside her crappy outer-borough apartment. She’d tried, tried so hard to stay in New York, to keep up with her photography job, but the city had changed for her, and the buildings she used to love had become like prison walls.
She needed air and space and warm sun on her face. Then maybe she’d be able to conquer the demons that haunted her nights and shadowed her days. Maybe then she’d be able to hold a camera again and see something through the lens besides the face of her attacker.
Maybe.
At the stop sign holding court in the intersection of Main Street and Honeysuckle Lane, her ten-year-old Toyota let out a smoky cough. The car’s AC had stopped working somewhere back in Baltimore, and exhaust curled in through the open windows, a sickly sweet stench that made it seem like she hadn’t journeyed very far from the congested streets of Brooklyn.
All it took to remind her that she was back in the small-town South was a glance out the window, at the wide verandas fronting the pastel Colonials lining Main Street, yielding after Honeysuckle Lane to quaint storefronts with happy flags and bright awnings, sporting first names as though they were residents, too. Joe’s Barber Shop. Ernie’s Hardware & Sundries. Betty’s Bakery. And then one that made her slow, almost stop.
Gator’s Garage.
One glimpse of the blue building, fronted by a hand-painted sign fashioned out of an old tractor-trailer tire, and Meri was fifteen again and getting her first clumsy kiss from Jack Barlow—and a year later, going through her first clumsy breakup. She remembered the smell of the motor oil, the dark spreading stain of it in the center of the garage floor, and most of all, Jack’s blue eyes, sad and serious, as he told her they were over. That he wanted more than a beauty-queen girlfriend, he wanted someone grounded, real. The words had stung and stayed with her long after he’d shipped out for the Middle East a week later. She’d headed in the opposite direction, to the Miss Teen America beauty pageant, and vowed to forget Jack Barlow ever existed.
A horn honked. Meri jerked her attention back to the road, and a moment later, Gator’s Garage was behind her. She took a right on Maple, a left on Elm, then turned again on Cherrystone and faced the house she had left in her rearview mirror five years ago.
It sat at the end of the cul-de-sac like a presiding queen, two stories of white clapboard with porches that stretched from end to end on both stories. The driveway flared out in pale bricks, laid before the Civil War and still flanked by twin willows draped with Spanish moss. It could have been 1840 instead of the twenty-first century, and in some areas of life inside that house, the world still ran as if Abraham Lincoln reigned in the White House.
The Toyota coughed again, jerked like an asthmatic, then sputtered to a stop in front of the house. Great.
Meri let out a long breath, but it did little to ease the tension in her neck, the tight band between her shoulders. With the car engine quiet and dead now, the North Carolina heat began to bake her in place.
The urge to turn around, to flee, to avoid what was coming, surged through her. Instead, she pulled out the keys and clasped them in her hand. The hard metal indented her palm with a dose of reality. She wasn’t running back to New York, not today, maybe not for a long while.
She had good reason to be here, one frail eighty-four-year-old reason. Grandpa Ray trumped everything else going on in her life.
Meri’s mother came out onto the front porch and crossed her arms over her chest. Meri could have spotted the look of disapproval and disappointment on Anna Lee Prescott’s face from the space station. She knew that look, knew it far too well.
Still, the masochistic hope that things might have changed rose in her chest and burned for a brief second. No, given the look on her mother’s face, there was little chance Anna Lee had done a one-eighty in the last five years. The best Meri could hope for was a forty-five-degree turn in the direction of common sense.
Meri ran a quick comb through her wind-blown hair, then headed up the sloping driveway and down the brick path leading to the front porch. Beside her, the manicured lawn unfurled like a lush green carpet, flanked by precisely pruned rosebushes and strategically placed annuals. A wooden swing hung from a long thick oak tree branch, drifting slightly in the breeze. It could have all been a spread in a magazine—and had been, twice, in Southern Living and Architectural Digest.
Her three-inch heel caught in the space between the pavers and Meri cursed her footwear choice. For hundreds of miles, she’d told herself she no longer cared what her mother thought.
Yeah, right. If that was so, then why had she exchanged her flip-flops for designer heels that pinched her toes and made her calves ache? Why had she spent twenty minutes smoothing the frizz out of her hair in the bathroom at a roadside truck stop?
Did I really think wearing heels and straightening my hair would make this easier?
Yeah, she had. Way to go, lying to herself.
When Meri reached the first porch step, an automatic smile curved across her face, as if she were stepping onto a stage instead of into her childhood home. All that practice had been good for something, it seemed. She could still prance around in high heels and look happier than a bird in the sky. “Hi, Momma.”
“Why, as I live and breathe,” Anna Lee said, emerging from the door frame to grasp Meri’s hand with both of her own. “My prodigal daughter has returned.”
Meri leaned in and pressed a kiss to her mother’s cheek. She caught the faint scent of floral perfume, mingled with the oversweet fragrance of hair spray and the mild notes of the powder dusting her flawless makeup. Everything about Anna Lee was as manicured and perfect as the lawn. Tawny hair sprayed into a submissive bob, white cotton shirt and navy shorts pressed into straight lines, and subdued, pristine makeup.
Anna Lee drew back and cupped Meri’s cheeks in her soft palms. “You look so worn-out, honey. Are you sleeping well? Eating right?” Her thumb skipped over the scar and she averted her eyes, as if pretending she hadn’t seen the red line would make the whole horrible thing disappear. “Why don’t you come in, splash some cold water on your face and get a little makeup on? You’ll feel right as rain.”
Irritation bubbled inside Meri, but she widened her smile and kept her lips together so she wouldn’t say something she’d regret. “It was a long drive, Momma. That’s all.”
Anna Lee’s thumb traced a light touch over the scar running down the left side of Meri’s face. “Is it...?”
Meri captured her mother’s hand
