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couldn’t be bought; she was happy in her own skin, with whatever life gave her.
    A bee buzzed nearby. Glory opened one eye to see if it was too near Scott.
    Granny said, “You tell your mama you were coming back here?”
    Glory shook her head. She really couldn’t explain
why
she hadn’t called her mother in Florida. Since Glory had left Dawson, she’d been avoiding speaking to her mother as much as possible. Clarice was like a counterpoint to Granny; chased by her own unhappiness and insecurity for years. It was suddenly startling to realize that Glory herself had fallen into a similar mind-set—but at least Glory had just cause. Her mother had lived with a chip on her shoulder most of her life. From grade school on, the driving force inside Clarice Baker had been to divorce herself from the hollow.
    The first step in that transition had happened the weekend after high school graduation when she had married Glory’s father, Jimmy Johnston, a town boy in her class whose parents both held respectable jobs with the telephone company and had a nice new ranch-style house on the outskirts of Dawson. But Clarice soon discovered that her new husband had no intention of following in his parents’ footsteps by finding a job that offered security and a pension, and buying a nice house on a quiet Dawson street. Jimmy loved dirt-track racing as much as he loved anything in his life. Clarice had settled for a mobile home on a city lot and a husband gone every weekend. But at least it was out of the hollow.
    When Glory was four, her dad had been killed in a motorcycle accident. The thing Glory remembered most about him was the smell of Goop, the hand cleanser he used after working on engines.
    After he died, his parents, Glory’s other grandparents, retired and moved to Florida. Clarice had gone to work at the bank as a teller. She was trapped in the mobile home, but she spent her salary proving to the town that she and her daughter were respectable—Girl Scouts, ballet lessons, and brand-name clothes for Glory; manicured nails and bridge club for herself. She had encouraged Glory to run for student government and try out for cheerleader. Clarice was fifteen times more excited when she made both than Glory had been.
    The icing on Clarice’s cake had been Glory’s marriage to Andrew Harrison, son of the most prominent family in Dawson. But even in that moment, the hollow had reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder. At the garden wedding reception, Glory had been standing beside her mother when they overheard someone say through the meticulously manicured boxwood hedge, “She seems like a nice enough young woman, especially considering where her people come from.” Glory had had to grasp her mother’s wrist to keep her from reaching through the hedge and grabbing the woman by the throat.
    Clarice had moved to Florida the next month.
    When Glory left Dawson after the fire, her mother had been insistent that she come to stay with her. After all, Florida had saved Clarice from her world of slight and unhappiness; surely it would do the same for Glory.
    But Glory had needed to be alone, not coddled in a way that reminded her every day of her loss. She’d struck out first for Asheville, then to a small town in Ohio, then to Kansas City, and finally St. Paul.
    She had yet to forget her loss.
    On their way back from berry picking, they took a fork in the trail that took them past a plain white clapboard church with a row of clear-glass-paned windows lining either side. In the churchyard stood an old iron fence that surrounded the graveyard where Bakers and Prathers (Granny had been a Prather before she married Pap) had buried their dead since long before the Civil War. From here they would follow the gravel road the rest of the way to Granny’s house.
    It had never struck Glory before how limited the geographic scope of Granny’s life had been. She’d been born on a farm not three miles from where she now lived. She’d gone