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think about Charlene Joiner. will entertained himself by driving back-country to the family farm, testing his memory on the network of little roads, most of them without signposts. Twenty minutes later, he turned onto the Raleigh road, and a moment later, the main house came into view. It was on the site where his great-great-grandfather had built, but the original frame farmhouse had burned in the 1930s.
    His father had returned in 1945 from service in the Army Air Corps, flying bombers out of England, and had brought back with him an Anglo-Irish bride. Patricia Worth, New name Lee had carried with her the original drawings of her Georgian family home in County Cork, and she had overseen the construction of a more than reasonable facsimile in the Southern countryside, built of brick, rather than the stone of the Irish house. The house was of a comfortable size, not quite grand, and it seemed as much at home on the red clay of Georgia as the original had on the green fields of Ireland.
    Will turned into the semicircular driveway, and, instead of continuing to the front door, went straight on toward a grove of trees on a little lake a couple of hundred yards behind the house. As he passed the house, a dog—a golden Labrador retriever—leapt from the back porch and tore after the car. Will slowed until the dog caught up with him, then laughed as the handsome animal raced alongside the car toward the trees.
    Will turned into a well-kept dirt track through the trees and came to his own house, a small, neat, angular cottage of stone and cedar. He had built it, with the help of two farmhands, the year he had joined his father in the law practice, when he was twenty-five. It sat in the copse, elevated a few feet from the ten-acre lake that his mother had designed and had constructed during the 1950s. Now the lake looked as though it had always been there.
    He got out of the car and was nearly knocked down by the flying dog.
    “Hey, Fred! How are you, old sport?” He knelt and let the animal lick his face and, gradually, calmed him. He got the luggage out of the back of the Wagoneer and gave Fred a briefcase to carry. The dog pranced about, proud of himself, and tried to bark, in spite of the handle in his mouth.
    Will trotted up the steps to the porch with the rest of his luggage, went into the house and dumped everything on the bed. Fred came and put the briefcase carefully on the bed, too.
    “What a good boy!” He scratched the dog behind the ears and sniffed the air; Marie, half of the black couple who took care of his parents, had left something good in the house. He wandered through the book-cluttered living room to the kitchen, found a plate of fresh chocolate-chip cookies, helped himself, then went back to the bedroom, munching, and unpacked. After a hot shower, he threw himself on the bed and dozed fitfully, stirring now and then to glimpse the sun sink into the lake.
    When he woke, he got into some clothes. The main house was run his mother’s way, and that meant a jacket and tie at dinner. Under a rising moon, with Fred running ahead, he walked through the trees and over the grassy expanse that separated the cottage from the main house.
    It was chilly, but not cold, an improvement over Washington, he thought.
    He entered the house and immediately ran into his father’s younger sister, Eloise, coming out of the kitchen.
    They embraced warmly.
    “You’ve lost some weight,” Ellie said. She had been widowed in World War II and had never remarried, still operating the ladies’ clothing store that her mother had started when Will’s grandfather had died. Now in her early seventies, she lived alone in Delano, but often came to dinner.
    “I’ve needed to.” Will laughed.
    “Anyway, they’ll put it back on me over Christmas, and if I know you, you’ll help.”
    Patricia Lee met her son at the library door and hugged him. At seventy, she was still a beautiful woman—tall, slender, and erect, though her auburn