The knots in my stomach hardened as the back roads became more and more familiar. The farm fields, corn, hay, and sunflower stretched out like patchwork on either side of me, welcoming me home and swallowing me whole. The steering wheel, gummy from my grip, seemed to navigate the road without me as I lifted my hand to signal at the last corner before the downward hill into town. It’s a strange, dark feeling coming home, when all the houses and the streets look the same but feel so different.

“Township of Rideau Lakes, Tarn Junction—we remember.” I read the town sign aloud and jammed the brakes. The car skidded toward the gravel shoulder, back to the headlights of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler, and then back again to the edge of the road, finally sliding into a dusty, gravel-thrown stop at the cusp of a ditch.

I kicked open my door and planted my feet on the ground for support, sucking at the dry wind, gulping mouthfuls of exhaust as cars whipped past, their drivers oblivious to my downpour of panic. The naked wooden arms of the town sign taunted me. I forced myself up, breathing in and holding my breath.

One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one- thousand. Exhale.

Stepping through the high weeds, I trudged back to the sign, grabbed its wide wooden leg, and swung myself around to see the town slogan again.

“Township of Rideau Lakes, Tarn Junction: an experience to remember,” I read aloud to no one.

By the time I made it to Heartening, situated smack in the middle of town on the main traffic artery of the village, a salty mix of nerves and unknowing had started to form hot yellow semicircles beneath my arms.

“Grace!”

Morgan Taylor rushed from the building’s large wooden entrance and up the cobbled walk with her arms outstretched as I threw open my car door. Before I was even standing up straight, she had enveloped me.

“I’m sorry I’m a bit late,” I mumbled into her round, soft shoulder as she squeezed me in her arms.

“Don’t be sorry, doll.”

She held my wrists lightly as she stepped back to take in the whole picture of me, I supposed. Her smile lit up her lightly wrinkled face. “You’re blond. It looks good on you.”

I thought of the roots I had touched up just the night before and the light blue sundress I had chosen for the ride and resisted the urge to let my hands reach out to touch both. I leaned into the car and grabbed my sun hat just as Morgan pulled at my free arm, leading me up the walk behind her toward the great, gray stone building.

“Roger is just inside. We were deciding whether or not to close up and meet you at our house, but I convinced him to wait. I was right, as usual.”

Her smile looked stiff, but her words were warm and welcoming. She heaved the wooden door open and ushered me in to a long hall before following me inside.

“Just down here to the right,” she said, her voice echoing against the millstone walls. “Have you never been in here before?”

“I don’t think so. It was a business building before I moved—”

“Grace!” Roger Taylor called from steps away as we rounded the corner into a vast open room stuffed with people’s previously loved possessions.

He was exactly as I remembered him: a stout, round man with blondish-red hair that poked out in odd places. As he hugged me, I leaned down slightly and felt the burn of his bristles against my cheek.

“Welcome home,” he said.

I felt the knot in my throat harden as I searched, unsuccessfully, for the right response. Roger waved a chubby hand out in front of us, brushing off my silence, and presented me with the fifty or so racks of used clothing.

“This is it,” he said. “It turns a pretty good coin. It’s been up and running since just after you left. Clothing dropoff is in the back. I’ll introduce you to the guys who help sort another day; they’re all gone home now. Our hours are normal business hours except on Sundays.”

“Sunday fun day,” Morgan chimed in.

Roger’s eyes seemed to dance with happiness. He rubbed his palms together. “Sundays, we push the clothes back to the perimeter of the building and our little consignment store morphs into a bustling hub of activity.”

“Sundays are when Heartening becomes the beating heart of the town—you’re going to love it! Everyone comes,” Morgan told me, finishing Roger’s thought like always. I groaned internally as I remembered Morgan’s constant need to be the center of attention.

Some things never change.

“I love it already,” I managed to say. “Thank you for all you’ve done—this job, the house, everything.”

“Oh, doll, we love you like our own.”

“Mom would have appreciated it all, too,” I said.

Morgan hugged me again. “I know, doll. You don’t need to say it.”

This time, in the crook of her neck, I felt hot tears push against my eyelids, fiery and aching with some hollow, nameless need.

“Let me show you around,” Roger said, leading the way up and down the rows of racked clothing. Morgan clutched my elbow and we followed close behind him. I was grateful for his interruption, which had prevented me from descending into the black hole of self-pity—a slide I’d become very proficient at making. As he pointed to the individual sections I hadn’t noticed earlier—women’s clothing, children’s clothing, swimwear—the scent of musty used things made my head swim with a warm sensation of something familiar and yet far away.

“Up there’s the loft. Al offers his time on Sundays to help with interview practice for some of the town’s folk. You remember Al?”

“Grocer Al? Of course. Who could forget that homemade bread of his?” I laughed and felt some of the heavy weight slip from my shoulders as I remembered the kind gentleman who owned the corner grocery store.

We made our way through the inner workings of Heartening, Tarn Junction’s consignment store slash “beating heart,” and headed out the back door toward the parking area. Roger and Morgan’s black sedan was the only car left in the small, unpaved lot.

“You can follow us back if you like,” Roger offered. “Roger, I’m sure she remembers how to get to our place.

She hasn’t been gone for that long,” Morgan snapped. I felt myself cringe at the condescension in her words.

“A year at least,” Roger answered before I could interject.

“No, it’s not even been a year since the whole ordeal. Besides, Roger, drop it.” Morgan huffed and glared at her husband, her wiry hair standing on end in the wind.

She looks like a Brillo pad with deep-set eyes.

I stifled the cruelty of my snicker and interrupted their banter to say, “Ten months. It’s been ten months since I left, and it’ll be a year on the eighth of October.”

Morgan hit Roger hard on the arm and gave him a shove toward the car. “I’m sorry, doll. I told him not to bring anything up.”

“It’s okay. People will talk.” I felt myself chuckle and heard a strange coarse sound rise from my throat, high- pitched and nearly hysterical. “Who the hell am I kidding? People probably haven’t stopped talking.”

Even as the words came out of my mouth, I couldn’t stifle the feeling of panic that rose up within me as my mind raced through images of all the talking that people had likely done in all those months I’d been gone. I forced a smile and watched Morgan and Roger’s expressions shift from excitement to worry. I smiled larger, this time, showing teeth. Roger scratched his head as he looked at me, his mouth twisted slightly. “Oh, honey, it’s great to see you looking so . . . healthy. You sure you don’t want to follow us?”

“I  kinda  want  to  walk,” I said. “I’ll come back for my car later. It’s fine.”

“Get in the car,” Morgan growled at Roger. She whipped the passenger-side door open and slammed it almost poetically behind her. Roger obeyed, sliding into the driver’s- side seat. He cast a meek wave in my direction as they pulled away.

I waved back.

It  was  all  the  same. Only different.

 

As I stood alone in the empty parking lot, I tried my best to conjure up the confidence I had felt that morning when I packed all my belongings into my purple hatchback. I had forced the hatch closed with my hip and felt full of possibility and a strange new sense of peace. The sun was shining and the calmness I’d been seeking for nearly a year had finally settled onto my shoulders as I looked out at the road I knew I’d soon be traveling. But now, dwarfed by the shadow of the stone building that would soon be my place of employment, that sense of courage and excitement had vanished. The familiar bubble of worry had already begun to eat at the inside of my throat, sizzling its way down into the pit of my stomach.

Walk it off, Gracie.

I decided to try to do just that: Walk it off.

As I followed the path back around Heartening toward Main Street, I dug in my small satchel bag for my key fob to lock the car, then thought better of it. I was not, after all, a big-city snob who didn’t trust her neighbors.

The Tarn Junction decorating committee’s hard work was in full bloom. Pots of pansies lined the sidewalk and brightened the storefronts with bursts of rich purple and sunshine yellow. I had rolled into town just past five o’clock and now as I walked along Main, past all the closed-up shops, the street felt like a ghost town. I passed Al’s Groceteria and couldn’t resist pressing my face to the glass of his large picture window. I knew I wouldn’t be able to smell his fresh baked goods but I imagined I could. Like a child, I peered at all the sticky sweetness on display. Growing up, all the kids knew that if they walked by Al’s just before school, most days he would be waiting in the door with a smile and a tray of freshly baked mini–cinnamon rolls or warm muffins.

“Overflow. I always seem to make just a few too many,” he would say. Then he would smile and shrug, wiping his hands on his flour-dusted apron.

Taking the bus in from the outskirts of town, I didn’t always make it in time to catch Al standing beneath the Groceteria’s brown awning, nodding his bald head in approval as my friends snatched up his sweets. But I always knew if I missed out, my friend Deva would keep a treat for me in her lunchbox. My heart warmed at the memory. I would call Deva soon—once I had settled in to my new place and had a few days of work under my belt. I was excited to see my best friend, but it had been a while since we’d seen each other and things had changed. I had changed. It was impossible that Deva hadn’t changed as well, and for all that, I needed to find my footing first. The ground needed to be solid beneath me in case the crack in our friendship had split into a chasm.

I pushed back from the window and wiped my breath from the glass. I continued past the library and the two churches that faced each other—Pentecostal on the south side of Main Street and Methodist on the north side—with a Liquor Control Board of Ontario store placed conveniently within walking distance from each. I took a left turn up Squire Road and, just like that, downtown Tarn Junction was behind me.

Squire Road was curvaceous and tree-lined, the perfect setting for a romantic scene in a novel, although nothing romantic had ever happened there—not to me, anyway. It was insulated by century homes and manicured lawns and broke open into a wide green space that led to the town’s only cemetery. I stopped at the bench just outside the short, iron gate.

Go in.

My body suddenly felt cold. I stood frozen, looking out over the rows of headstones in the evening glow of summer. To the left, the stone angel stood above a patch of bright new grass, not quite thick enough to hide the rectangular outline that had been cut into the earth. She was just as I remembered her: her huge white wings dropping sadly around her shoulders, her face buried in her arms. My mother was buried in this cemetery—I could go say hello. As I pushed back the iron gate, a tightness squeezed at my heart and my leaden legs propelled me forward and to the right, toward a small gray grave marker, its inscription caked with dirt and hidden by a tangle of weeds. I forced myself to my knees, my heart pounding in my chest, the grip of cold fear still tight around me. Ripping at the thick weed stalks, I cleared the stone face and stood back.

I can’t be here.

I wanted to speak, to say the words aloud. I wanted to let her know that my adoptive family had been good to me, and that Morgan had treated me like an auntie all this time, just like she promised she would. I wanted to tell my mother that even though I didn’t remember anything about her or know anything about her life, I knew that she had given me mine.

I hope you’re not ashamed of me.

My stomach heaved and I fled. I didn’t run, because no matter how much I felt like it, running through the resting place of the dead would have felt disrespectful. I walked quickly as a familiar chorus of chaos began in my mind. I tried to mute the jumble of voices and screams that I could never discern before they began to overwhelm my senses. With the gate safely behind me, I caught my breath and turned my face to the sun, counting slowly in my mind. I headed toward Charlton Drive and my new little house, taking in long cleansing breaths and counting.

Two hundred steps past the graveyard, at the corner of Squire and Charlton, I stopped in front of Jax Café and thought how about how strange it was that this small-town crossroad was ultimately the crossroads of my life. For the first time since early that morning, a sense of excitement began to shimmer inside of me.

Something moved inside the café dumpster. I turned, curious.

The garbage can’s rusted metal lips parted slightly. Then its heavy mouth cracked open. The sun glinted off a piece of broken glass inside, blinding me for a moment. I squinted and moved closer as a young girl no more than six years old crawled out.

Behind her matted curtain of black hair, the child’s eyes were hollow and emotionless, her freckled cheeks pinched with distrust. She wore a bloodstained plaid dress, her arms slack at her sides. She stared at me. Clots of blood clung to her hair and gummed up the laces of her canvas running shoes.

Tension hummed between us.

I  knelt  down  to  her  eye  level  and  stretched  out  my hands. “Synia,” I whispered. “Come on, let’s go home.”