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pretend.
    Before I turned off the light, I reminded them where I’d be sleeping, and described in detail how to get there. I had this crazy feeling that I was abandoning them.
    When I’d finished tucking them in at last, Jean showed up at the door and said, “If you go straight to sleep, tomorrow I’ll show you where the pirate treasure is buried.”
    Usually bedtime in our lives was a lengthy ordeal. I can’t even describe all the hours I’d spent begging them to go to sleep as they came out over and over, asking for water and cheese sticks and back rubs. Tank often asked for one more kiss and then, when I bent over, clamped his arms around my neck in a “love lockdown” until I physically wrestled myself free.
    That night, though, as Jean and I headed downstairs, there was only quiet in our wake.
    I waited for the sound of feet on the stairs while Jean made us tea.
    I waited as we got situated in the comfy chairs in the living room.
    And I continued to wait as Jean asked me all about my life. What were my interests? My hobbies? My passions? What had I majored in? What was my favorite time of year? Favorite holiday? Favorite animal? At first I was just polite: I liked to water-ski, though it had been years. I’d gone through a knitting period thatproduced several scarves I never wore. I liked to work crossword puzzles. I liked to read biographies. I liked black-and-white movies of every genre.
    Jean leaned on her hands and soaked it all in as though I were the most fascinating person in the world. Before I knew it, an hour had gone by—and I had forgotten about the kids entirely for the second time in a day.
    “I think they’re asleep,” Jean said when I finally took a breather.
    “Not possible,” I said. “They don’t just fall asleep.”
    “Never underestimate pirate treasure,” she said.
    “Sometimes when it’s really bad, I just let them watch TV until they conk out.”
    Jean shrugged. “No TV.”
    My eyes snapped open. “No TV?”
    She shook her head.
    “None? Not even one?”
    “Nope.”
    I looked around her living room in disbelief. No TV. After all the crazy things I’d seen that day—the stool in the bathroom made from a turtle shell, the picnic table with old truck tires for legs, the eight deer that had sauntered through the yard that evening single file— this , this one thing, was blowing my mind.
    “Not even a tiny one in the kitchen?”
    Jean shook her head. “Nope.”
    “No Internet, either,” she added with a note of pride.
    I gaped.
    “You’ll have to hit the library,” she added. “That’s where I update the farm’s Facebook page.”
    “The farm has a Facebook page?”
    “Of course,” she said.
    Several moments passed as I tried to absorb it. Finally I said, “What on earth do you do for fun?”
    “Oh, lots of things. Take walks. Look for stones. Read in the hammock.” She studied my face and then offered, “I do have a radio in the kitchen.”
    “A radio?”
    “A loud one.”
    And what good, exactly, was a radio? Who curled up in front of a radio at the end of a long day?
    “We have our own public radio station here in town. It’s got a great bluegrass show.”
    I couldn’t even fake it for her. She wanted me to replace Project Runway with bluegrass? This whole move suddenly felt like a mistake. I wasn’t a goat farmer. I wasn’t even a small-town person.
    “I have a record player, too,” she said.
    I felt queasy. I didn’t belong here. What had I been thinking? Not only was I going to have to crawl back to Houston and beg for my old job, I was going to have months, possibly years, of I-told-you-so faces from an extra-self-satisfied version of my mother.
    But I’d been up since five, and it was close to eleven. I’d left every familiar thing behind. I’d gambled on a new life that had turned out to be too much. I felt that thickness in my chest that you get before you start crying, and, as if to make a literal escape from it, I stood up.
    Jean