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machine . . .
    But the cupboard is filled with stacked glass mixing bowls, all of them faded pastel colors and most of them chipped, and an unfamiliar Corning Ware casserole set that looks as though it’s never been used.
    She tries another one. No coffeemaker, although there’s a china teapot with the spout broken off and a bunch of mugs her father used to collect from places he visited. They’re the souvenir kind, imprinted with cheesy slogans and mottos. Rory moves them around, looking at the names of places. There are a few from Albany. One from Niagara Falls. One from the Catskills.
    You never went far from home, did you, Daddy? Rory thinks wistfully. She considers the places she’s been since she left Lake Charlotte; thinks about how she’s skied in the Rockies and sailed in the Florida Keys; camped in the Black Hills and braved a Minnesota winter.
    Patrick Connolly would have loved it, all of it. He had taught American history and geography at the local community college. When Rory was young, she used to sit on his lap and turn the pages of his big atlas while he told her about faraway places, told her stories of what had happened there in the “olden days,” as she used to call them. He could go on for hours, and she would feign fascination long after she had lost interest, because nobody else ever listened to him, and because she felt safe, curled up there on her father’s lap, his strong arms draped around her shoulders and his deep voice rumbling in her ears.
    Oh, Daddy, Rory thinks, her eyes suddenly stinging with tears. I got my wanderlust from you, didn’t I? You never wanted to live your whole life in this little town, in this run-down house, saddled with a teaching job and bills and a wife who was too emotionally fragile to go farther than the A&P a few blocks away .
    Only now does Rory grasp the extent of her father’s longing. Back then, he acted as though it didn’t matter that he never went anywhere, that they never did anything. He used to tell Rory that someday he was going to retire and buy one of those big old RVs and see the country.
    Who knew then that he wasn’t going to live to see forty?
    So he’d never seen any of the places he dreamed of and read about. Never went more than a few hundred miles from Lake Charlotte, except for the year they had spent in California while he was on sabbatical.
    Rory tries to push that out of her mind.
    That was different, she reminds herself. That was a terrible time. So many years of Daddy wistfully talking about how he’d love to take a sabbatical, and Mom flatly refusing to leave Lake Charlotte—and then, boom. Trouble struck, and they saw their only chance to escape. A hollow victory for Daddy. The year in California was more like an exile than a vacation.
    Rory hurriedly closes the cupboard and turns away, anxious to forget the period in her life when everything fell apart, setting into motion a chain of events that had ultimately destroyed her family.
    Her gaze falls on Molly, still sitting at the table with her back to Rory, crunching her cereal and flipping the pages of Seventeen magazine.
    Rory contemplates telling her sister that she used to read that magazine, too, when she was Molly’s age. She and Carleen used to bring it into the upstairs bathroom they shared and try to duplicate the models’ hairstyles and makeup on each other.
    Carleen.
    Everywhere Rory turns, there are ghosts.
    I should never have come back here. Why did I come back here?
    Because you had no choice, she reminds herself. Because you couldn’t run away forever. Deal with it. Get past it. It’s time to start forgetting .
    Apparently, learning to forget means first allowing the memories back in.
    She clears her throat and blurts, “Is there a coffeemaker?”
    Molly jumps, clearly startled, then shakes her head without turning it around. “Uh-uh.”
    “No coffeemaker?” Rory asks incredulously.
    “Mom drinks tea,” Molly says in a voice that lets Rory know that