A boy carrying an armload of towels and pillows appears in the doorway. He’s not much older than she is—fourteen or fifteen—a younger version of his father, with the same yellow hair, hard jaw, and cold eyes. He fires the pillows out onto the pile from where he stands, then aims a hard little smile at her. It isn’t the first time he’s helped his father evict someone.

Eviction.

The word fills her with shame. She knows things have been tight, that her mother’s been struggling to make ends meet, stretching the groceries with hot dogs and boxed mac and cheese, but she never realized it was this bad. No wonder she’s been picking up extra shifts at the Piggly Wiggly. And why she always looks so worn-out, like little by little she’s coming apart at the seams.

Christy-Lynn is still staring at the sopping heap of their belongings, her gaze locked on a fuzzy purple foot—the stuffed dinosaur her mother had given her for her sixth birthday—when something, a bit of sound or movement, suddenly catches her eye. Her stomach lurches as the curtains part in the window overhead and a pair of faces appear. And they aren’t the only ones watching. All around the complex, people are peering through windows or hovering in doorways, looking on as the scene plays out. Their watching makes it worse somehow.

She shoves down the urge to cry. What good will crying do? She needs to call her mother, to tell her what’s happening, only her boss doesn’t like her getting calls at work, and the last thing they need right now is for Charlene Parker to get fired. Besides, there’s no way to call. Even if the landlord were to let her back into the apartment—which she was willing to bet he wouldn’t—the phone had been shut off weeks ago.

The landlord’s son appears again, this time with an armload of pots and pans, including the cast-iron skillet her mother uses to make corn bread. He drops them onto the stoop with a clatter, then turns back to take a box his father is holding out. It looks like cleaning supplies from under the kitchen sink, window cleaner, cleanser, dish soap, a half-used roll of paper towels. She watches as the cardboard darkens in the rain, the roll of paper towels slowly wilting.

It’s the paper towels that finally push Christy-Lynn to the edge, the sight of them slumping in the sharp, icy rain is simply too much to bear. They don’t have much, a fact that’s hard to dispute when everything they own now sits in one ghastly pile on the stoop. Is it too much to ask that he spare their roll of paper towels? A wave of rage suddenly boils up in her, mingled with a throat full of tears she struggles to swallow. It isn’t the unfairness of it; if they’re really two months behind in their rent, he has the right to evict them. But did he really need to toss their stuff out into the rain while everyone watched?

The son reappears with a stack of plates and mugs. He sets them down on the sidewalk, then drops the dish towels he has wadded under his arm into a puddle. For a moment, she considers charging him, knocking him off his feet and pummeling him bloody, but he’s too big for that.

“Your father’s a bastard, you know that?” she chokes out instead, hating that she can’t keep the tears from bleeding into her words.

He stares at her a moment through the rain, his straw-colored hair plastered flat to his head, then shrugs. “If there’s stuff you want, you best get busy.” He bends down and reaches into the carton of cleaning supplies, coming up with a box of plastic trash bags. He tosses the box to her without aiming. “If this stuff ain’t off the sidewalk in the next hour, it’s going in the dumpster.”

Christy-Lynn watches mutely as the landlord’s son disappears back into the apartment. And then finally, because there’s nothing else to do, she stoops to pick up the box of trash bags, rips one from the roll, and begins stuffing handfuls of wet clothes into it.

FIVE

Sweetwater, Virginia

November 20, 2016

Wade Pierce stared at the blinking cursor with gritty eyes. It still wasn’t right. Three hours on one damn scene, and it still wasn’t right. Nor was bashing away at it for another three hours likely to fix the problem. It wasn’t the scene; it was him. He was edgy and unfocused, buzzy from way too much coffee. Frazzled, he shoved back from the table and padded to the fridge for a Mountain Dew, then opted for a bottle of water instead. The last thing he needed was more caffeine. He took a long pull as he opened the sliding glass doors and stepped out onto the deck.

The air was heavy and gray, thick with the scent of damp ground and distant wood smoke. It was a good smell, an earthy smell. No bus fumes or car exhaust. No reek of trash or piss-soaked alleys. He filled his lungs, scanning the rolling hills that rimmed the town of Sweetwater. The foliage that had set the hilltops ablaze in recent weeks was gone now, leaving behind a landscape that seemed to mirror his mood of late, chilly and barren, devoid of color. Maybe a city boy trying to live off the grid wasn’t such a good idea after all. Or maybe he was just sick of his own company.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time—getting away. Okay, running away if he was being truthful. To finally get back to doing something that fed his soul instead of just his bank account. Only it wasn’t working. He liked to pretend running off to the wilds to live like a hermit had been about getting in touch with his muse, but it hadn’t. At least not entirely.

He’d been hoping for peace, maybe some kind of closure after his abrupt and somewhat volatile departure from Week in Review. But coming to Sweetwater hadn’t brought him anything remotely close to peace. Instead, he spent the better part of each day questioning the wisdom of chasing a dream he should have buried twenty years ago.