“Maine?” said Haywood. “Now why would you want to build a house ’way up yonder?”
“Get your cup and let’s go,” Seth told him with a big grin. “I’ll explain it to you over at Robert’s.”
“Sorry about that,” I said as the last of my brothers disappeared down the rutted lane.
“Why?” Dwight asked. “Think I don’t know the way they like to help and give advice? Besides, you didn’t have anything special planned, did you?”
“Well, when you called this morning, you said something about wanting to wet a line and I had my mouth set for pan fish.”
“Really?” He moved closer and brushed my hair back from my face with both hands so he could examine my mouth with exaggerated care. “Nope, that’s not how it looks to me.”
His lips were mere inches from mine and I didn’t need a second invitation to put my arms around his neck and let him swing me down from the tailgate, although I could have taken him right there on the back of the truck. Summer had been long and celibate for both of us; and my house here, his apartment in Dobbs, on a couch, on a bed, on a floor or table, we had spent these past ten days making up for lost time. Hard to remind myself that I’d spent my whole life treating him like another one of the boys—not when the mere touch of his hand on my hair was now enough to unleash every hormone in my body.
It was full dark by the time we were ready to think about food again. Much too late to try to catch our supper out on the pond. Instead, we went over to Jerry’s Steak & Catfish House and had a waitress bring it to us with a side dish of onion rings and a basket of hushpuppies.
Big mistake.
Every third person who passed by our table was someone who’d known Dwight or me from birth or grade school, and they each had to stop and tell us how surprised they were when they heard we were engaged, “but we’re wishing y’all lots of luck and happiness.” Whenever I lifted my eyes from my plate, I saw beaming faces watching us.
“Thank God for Cedar Gap,” I said when we were back in Dwight’s truck, headed for home. “Don’t you wish you could get out of Dodge, too?”
“Why?” he asked, sounding honestly puzzled.
“The way everybody’s burbling over us? It’s not making you crazy?”
He grinned. “Nope.”
“Well, it is me. I feel like I’m drowning in a tub of warm honey.”
“Not me. I sort of like it that people seem happy for us. Besides, you’re the one who thought that getting married would generate some political goodwill, remember? Seems to me it’s working.”
I sighed and glumly admitted he was right.
At the house, he didn’t switch off the truck. “You’ll want to pack tonight and get an early start tomorrow and I’d just be in the way.”
It was a sensible decision, especially since all our appetites were temporarily sated. Nevertheless, I was irrationally disappointed. We’d been together only a few short days, yet I was already getting used to his comforting bulk in my bed, and when he stayed over, I found I liked waking up to the smell of coffee … among other things.
I reached for the door handle. “See you next weekend, then.”
“Actually, you won’t,” he reminded me. “I’ll be out that way myself. We’ll probably pass each other on I-40 Saturday morning.”
I’d forgotten that he was due to spend the weekend in the mountains of Virginia with Cal.
Slow as Dwight drives unless he’s expediting to a crime scene, I figured I could be halfway home before he got out of the state. “Want to try and meet up for breakfast in Burlington or Greensboro?”
“Sounds good,” he said, “but I plan to get on the road real early.”
“That’s okay. I’ll call you.”
He leaned over to kiss me goodnight and I deliberately kept it short and casual so he wouldn’t think I was trying to change his mind about staying the night. His smile in the glow of the dash lights was teasing. “Don’t go driving off any mountains while you’re out there, you hear?”
He knows I don’t have a head for heights.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be hugging the center line all the way.”
Actually, except for my ears popping every time the elevation rose too quickly, the drive out next morning was fine.
When I left home at sunrise, the trees along Possum Creek were just starting to turn. Fall was late this year. Sassafras and crape myrtles had been showing a few orange and pink leaves for a couple of weeks, but oaks and maples were still mostly green.
By the time I reached the foothills around Hickory, the gums and tulip poplars were bright yellow. At Morganton, I left I-40 and angled northwest toward Lafayette County and Cedar Gap. As I passed over the eastern continental divide and started down a steep decline, late-morning sunshine lit up the valley from one side to the other and range after range of hills spread out before me in glorious fall colors. Heaven’s streets of gold are going to look pretty bland compared to those brilliant oranges and burning reds, the tawny browns and flaming coppers of trees I couldn’t begin to identify.
I almost ran off the road trying to take it all in and automatically braked to give myself time to drink in the beauty.
Behind me, a car honked angrily, then zipped around me. The driver gave me the finger as he passed and I heard him yell, “Fricking leafer! Get off the goddamned road!”
Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have slowed so abruptly, but he didn’t have to go ballistic. Thoroughly steamed, I picked up speed and kept my mind on my driving the rest of the way.
Lafayette County is tucked into a fold of the Blue Ridge Mountains right smack up against the Tennessee border. It’s one of the smallest counties in North Carolina. In square miles, its actual footprint is only a sixth the size of Colleton County’s, but if you could lay it out somewhere and iron its craggy old hills as flat as Colleton’s landscape, it’d probably be half again bigger.
Cedar Gap sits right below a ridge that separates two valleys. It’s not the biggest town in Lafayette County—that honor belongs to Howards Ford down in the valley below. Indeed, Howards Ford was the site of the first courthouse, but it was burned during the Civil War when feelings between secessionists and unionists ran high, so the county seat was moved temporarily to Cedar Gap. After the war, the change became permanent. The “new” courthouse was struck by lightning in the late seventies and burned to the ground, which is why the current courthouse is built of native undressed stone and blends into the landscape like a modern, low-slung office building rather than something with Corinthian columns and a Grecian frieze.
I stopped at the grocery store in Howards Ford for some basic essentials and made a mental note of where a drugstore was since I’d been warned that Cedar Gap has none. No Wal-Mart, Kmart, movie theater, no OfficeMax or Home Depot either. A three-lane road winds from the valley up to Cedar Gap—three lanes so that cars don’t get stuck behind eighteen-wheelers that can’t seem to clock more than twenty-five miles an hour getting up that grade. Here at noon on a beautiful blue-sky Sunday, the road was clogged. Not with trucks, though.
With tourists.
While every third car seemed to have a Florida license plate, I did see plates from several other states, all moving antlike up and down the mountain. Cameras poked from the open windows and I could almost hear the passengers telling their driver to slow down! Wait! Look over there at that bunch of yellow trees! Oooh, see those red maples! Stop!
No wonder that earlier driver had given me the finger.
There are numerous scenic pull-off spots along this road, and every one of them was packed by tourists who hung over the rails with their video cameras to get a better view or a more artistic angle on those spectacular fall colors. The eleven miles between Howards Ford and Cedar Gap took me forever, and when I got there, it was more of the same—every parking spot taken, every sidewalk bench filled. A large bronze monument to World War I sat in the center of a traffic circle on one of the few pieces of purely level ground in town, and the low stone walls that circled it were lined with happy tourists who licked ice-cream cones from the hand-dipped ice-cream shop across the street while they watched the passing show.