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Could I save her from her grave mistake? Could I turn her heart a different direction before the wedding? It suddenly felt cliché, and a little desperate, me coming back.
    I sat in my car, a six-year-old blue Toyota Corolla liftback, and stared at the plane outside the school, a WWIImemorial featuring a real F-86 Sabre. It was under the left wing of that plane that I had asked Jesse to the prom. She had refused, saying, “I ain’t prom material, Matt, and you know it.”
    “I don’t know it, Jesse. You’re the prettiest girl in school. You deserve to be queen.”
    “Can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” she said.
    “If it’s because you don’t have money for a dress, I can help.”
    No matter how much I pleaded, the answer was no. And the sight of the plane brought back the old ache.
    I passed the ghost of Blake’s General Store, just a shell now. A half mile later I came to the Dogwood Food and Drug where Jesse worked. I knew this, as well as everyone who had died within a fifty-mile radius, from my mother. She clipped obituaries like coupons and sent them, but the names were just as hazy on the page as they were in my mind.
    At my grandmother’s house, which my parents had made their own after her death, I pulled halfway up the drive and sat overlooking the creek, water trickling underneath the bridge. The stately walnut trees were still there but the large hickory was a stump. Lightning had done its cruel work two summers before—my mother had sent a snapshot. The pine trees my father and I had planted as a project to replenish the deforested earth were huge. They had been about as big as my hand when we planted them and now they soared above me. Funny how much growth can happen in twelve years.
    I was startled by a banging on the window and recognized Jasper Meadows, who lived across the road. He carried a shotgun and had a chaw of tobacco the size of a fist in his mouth. He was as weathered as his coveralls and as faded as the Cincinnati Reds hat that sat crooked on his head. I rolled down my window.
    “What are you doing sittin’ there?” he said around the chaw, an edge to his voice.
    “Mr. Meadows? I didn’t want to wake my parents.”
    He gave a crusty laugh. “You’re Calvin’s boy? The little one?”
    “Matt.”
    He grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Well, I’ll be. Matt Plumley. How’s everything up in Chicago?” He said the name of the city with an “er” at the end.
    “It was still there when I left,” I said.
    His eyes were milky in the middle and he cocked his head and pawed at the gravel. “Shame about them Cubs. I thought this might be their year.”
    “Yeah, me too.”
    “All right. Won’t bother you. Just keeping an eye out on the groundhog that keeps getting in my muskmelons and I saw you sitting here and thought maybe you was up to no good.”
    “Not this morning,” I said with a smile. “Are there a lot of people up to no good these days?”
    “You’d be surprised. Don’t know what the world is coming to.” He took off his hat and scratched the side of his head with the bill. “Have you seen your mama lately?”
    “No, sir. But I’ve talked with her.”
    “Well, she’ll be happy to see you, I’m sure. All your family is good people. You ought to come around more often.” He said it to me, but I could tell he meant it for his own children, who had flown and hadn’t returned. “People are way too busy these days, if you ask me.”
    I wanted to ask him not to let anyone know I was home, but I figured Jasper would keep the news between him and the groundhog.
    He waved a hand without turning around and kept walking.
    I pulled up the driveway a few minutes later and parked over the septic tank. There was a garden above the house in full bloom, near the barn. My father’s tools and mower were now in a shed below the house, but not much had changed since my childhood. I took a walk in the yard, the dew wet on the grass and clover.
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