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first person in my family to leap back in.”
    By asking around, Trey had learned that Jerome’s grandfather was a preacher and his father was a vice president at Mechanics and Farmers Bank. Jerome’s great-grandfather had been a sharecropper and his family before that had been slaves on some Harris’s farm. Jerome Harris, a professor of history specializing in the history of the South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, probably knew which, but Trey didn’t.
    Jerome had opened Trey’s eyes to new possibilities. He’d started looking around at the family he met at weddings, funerals and reunions. Most were working class—farmers, mechanics, retired mill workers and the like. But there were also a number of teachers, and every once in a while a doctor or a lawyer popped up. There was even an army colonel. And the one thing all these escapees from the farm had in common was that they had studied hard enough in high school to get into a good college.
    Since that moment, Trey and Jerome had leveled into a relationship somewhere between acquaintances and friends. They had nodded to each other in the hall all through middle and high school and kept in touch through college. No matter where their lives had drifted, occasional emails were exchanged and major life changes kept track of through Facebook, if nothing else. Like distant but friendly cousins, Trey supposed.
    Jerome had always regarded Trey’s desire to escape Durham with a bit of amusement, saying, “If I can get along as a black man in the South, you can survive as a white one.” But Trey had watched his father drink and grow nothing but anger, dirt and kudzu while his mother worked long hours at a job she hated. If he didn’t pull up his roots and flee, he wouldn’t do any better. His destiny had been sown in the clay.
    Even now, as he climbed into his car to parade to the graveyard for the burial, the familiar rolling hills of the Piedmont were more oppressive than picturesque. Trey wasn’t even able to feel relief that his father’s overbearing spirit was gone from the earth. The only positives about the day had been talking with Jerome and seeing Max’s muscular legs sticking out beneath her black skirt.
    * * *
    T HE FIRST DAY of packing had been surprisingly easy, Trey thought as he watched his brother leave. His father had an absurd amount of clothes for an old man who never went anywhere, but it hadn’t been hard to sort them into donation and trash piles. Some of the clothes weren’t worth wearing to muck out a pigsty—apparently the man never threw anything away. And their father’s pack-rat tendencies would make the rest of the week harder, especially since the man hadn’t cleaned out their mother’s stuff in the five years since her death, either.
    It was a two-for-the-price-of-one deal at the Harris family farm. Or Max’s Vegetable Patch, which was what the sign on the refrigerator van said. The name was cutesier than Trey associated with the woman who’d shot Pepsi can after Pepsi can without flinching.
    Though he’d tried, he hadn’t been able to convince Kelly to stay for supper. His brother had taken some of the leftover food with him but had muttered on about his own life, leaving Trey alone in the house surrounded by his parents’ stuff. At least there was a Carolina game on and conference play had started.
    His plate filled with a variety of casseroles, he looked out the kitchen window to see the light on in Max’s barn. Maybe he didn’t have to be alone in the house watching a basketball game. Trey stuck his plate in the microwave, set the timer and headed out the back. Ashes barked when he knocked on Max’s door.
    She opened the door wearing an oversize turquoise sweater that looked surprisingly nice with her red hair, though a bit ridiculous with the pink-bunny pajama bottoms and fuzzy, purple slippers. As Trey had come to expect, Ashes was sitting at Max’s feet, though the dog looked less annoyed with