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find out.
    His late mother’s house looms ahead. The For Sale sign is still up, as it has been since early May. If they don’t sell it soon, he’ll have to talk Mike and Sandy into going thirds on a paint job. It’s been five years since the last one, and the old wood really drinks it up. He’s not unhappy that his son is living there now, even if it is more or less from necessity.
    Brady’s dirty red pickup is out front, which means he’s either taking a long lunch break or his latest career, as an apprentice bricklayer, is just one more line on a long, discouraging résumé.
    He knows he should stop by and speak to his son. He knows he’s lying when he tells himself he absolutely has to keep moving, that he can’t afford to dawdle, that the online-ordered bounty in the back of his truck must go through. But he keeps driving anyhow.
    By the time he’s finished his oblong loop, it’s after 4. He crosses back into town from the south, over Speakeasy Creek, where half a dozen more kids are lying mostly submerged in the cool, shady water, hands and feet hanging on to inner tubes. The kids at Sycamore Creek were white; these are brown. The schools have been integrated since before Jack started ninth grade, but the creeks are still Jim Crow. The funniest thing is that sometimes, it’s the African-American kids who float about in Sycamore Creek and the whites in Speakeasy. Somehow, both races seem to know whose creek is whose, according to the day or the season. He sees them interacting sometimes at the McDonald’s, or hanging out in the Food Lion parking lot, but at the creeks, it might as well be 1955.
    He turns left just past the bridge, onto Larkmeadow Lane. To the right, it’s Eighth Street. It used to be Eighth Street the other way, too, before Cully Dane and his partners who built Speakeasy Glen persuaded the town council to change it to something “more poetic.”
    Jack passes two shady side streets with faux-aged wooden signs, then turns onto Woodpecker Way. He parks on the street, taking up most of the curb fronting their cul-de-sac contemporary. He enjoys the new house, barely three years old. It’s just that it’s so different. He spent all those years living in the farmhouse, with low ceilings and no more windows than an early 20 th -century country home should have, and the space and light here sometimes overwhelm him.
    The ceilings are so tall he needs a stepladder to change light bulbs, and there are so many skylights that he’s told Gina he’s thinking about wearing sun block inside the house. The spiral staircase still seems strange, with its wedges of metal and carpet surrounded by air. Wesley, the terrier, has to be carried down them at least twice a week after following Jack or Gina or Shannon upstairs and then whimpering at the abyss, as helpless as a cat up a tree.
    Jack is happy enough with it, though, or would be if the mortgage payments were more appropriate to his and Gina’s present salaries.
    He gets a Coke from the refrigerator and climbs the steps, calling to Shannon to keep Wesley from following him.
    He goes into the back room and shuts the door.
    They have a routine. He will write for an hour and a half, then come down to help prepare dinner. Gina gets home at 6, and by 8, he’s back upstairs.
    It’s been two years now. When he started, he had no idea how long it would take, only that he had to do it.
    It wasn’t easy to give up the long-distance job, driving his own rig, making more than many of the college graduates around them. The money he got from selling his rig carried them for a while, and he’s invested some. Mack McLamb is a broker, and the tech stock he talked Jack into buying in 1998 is soaring.
    But even he knows they can’t go on like this forever.
    He can’t fault Gina. She deserves some kind of medal for not just packing up and leaving, or at least trying to have him