One Mountain Away. Emilie Richards

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      Ethan never knew what to say to Maddie’s father. Jeremy and Taylor maintained a cordial relationship so they could be better parents to their daughter, but the road wasn’t easy. Their history was troubled. Maddie had been conceived when Taylor was only sixteen and Jeremy just a year older. Their high school romance had been stormy and brief, the baby a postscript. They had few if any happy memories to build on.

      Ethan was never sure where Jeremy’s questions or even casual remarks were leading. Was he merely making conversation? Was he implying Taylor was too busy to be a proper mother? Was he hoping to throw a wrench into the finely tuned machinery of their custody arrangement?

      “Taylor manages everything like a pro,” he said pleasantly.

      “Maddie still up?”

      “It would be a rare evening if she was asleep this early,” Ethan said. “I’m putting her on.”

      Maddie was sitting taller, and she flipped her disheveled ponytail over one shoulder. “Daddy!”

      Ethan went into the kitchen to give his granddaughter privacy. While technically Jeremy and Taylor shared custody, Taylor had Maddie with her most of the time. Jeremy spent time in Asheville with his daughter whenever he could, but Maddie had never visited him at his home in Nashville. Ethan wasn’t sure if Taylor had convinced him their daughter was better off in familiar surroundings, or if Jeremy didn’t want to learn what he needed to know to care for her. Whatever the truth, Maddie adored and missed her father.

      Taylor hadn’t been able to get to the dishes, and now, as Ethan stacked the apartment-size dishwasher he’d given her for Christmas, he hoped his daughter had gotten to the studio in time. She taught eight classes a week at Moon and Stars, and the owner was understanding. He just hoped Taylor hadn’t tested the woman’s patience tonight.

      By the time Ethan had finished cleaning the kitchen, Maddie was still chatting with her father. He stood at the sink and stared out at the yard beyond. He was a shadowy reflection in the double-hung window—long face, pointed chin, high forehead—a man still attractive to women, judging by the offers of dinner and more he received from women at least a full decade younger than himself.

      Beyond his reflection the faint outline of a crescent moon hung low in the still-bright sky, just visible beyond the neighbor’s tree line. A wisteria-scented breeze through the screen door ruffled his silvering hair. He was just fifty-six. Charlotte had been twenty-five when she had given birth to Taylor, and Taylor had just turned seventeen when Maddie was born. But this evening Ethan felt older than the mountains.

      Spring was a time of renewal, of flowers bursting into bloom, of birds mating and building nests. He was twice divorced, but now his first wife, Taylor’s mother, was on his mind, and so was the spring right before they met.

      He had only been twenty-five, an intern at a local architectural firm and still a stranger to the city that was now his permanent home. With few contacts and no real friends, he had begun jogging after he returned home in the evenings from the office. He had often parked in unexplored neighborhoods and jogged along residential or downtown streets to learn more about the Blue Ridge community where he’d landed.

      Now he remembered one such evening, twilight just beginning to thicken around him and the same haunting fragrance in the air. He had chosen Montford for his jog, a historic neighborhood with a satisfying mixture of architectural designs, some shabby and in need of renovation, but many that were still prime specimens of another generation’s craftsmanship. He’d begun on Montford Avenue, then veered off on a side street to avoid traffic.

      He had been lost in thought about the blueprints for an office building he’d been asked to comment on, just aware enough of his surroundings that he didn’t stray into traffic or run behind a car backing out of a driveway. He’d dodged a woman walking two identical yapping poodles, stumbled over a loose chunk of concrete.

      Funny the details he still remembered.

      He had just been ready to turn the corner and circle the block on his way back to his car when a woman on the next block caught his eye. Back then, as now, Asheville had been filled with young women. He had been as appreciative as any twenty-something heterosexual man of the opportunities, but having just moved away from a failed love affair, he had also been wary.

      This woman, seen at a distance, was more vision than flesh. A ruffled skirt floated just above her ankles, a scoop-necked blouse bared a long, graceful neck. Her hair curled over her shoulders, shining and hinting that it might be red, although in the dying light, he couldn’t tell for sure.

      Something about the way she hurried tugged at him. She was willowy, bending into the breeze like a sapling at the edge of a mountain stream. He liked the way she held herself. He liked the curve of her hair, of her jaw, of her breasts. He liked the graceful yet determined way she moved up the sidewalk, as if she had all the time in the world and none of it to spare.

      He’d wondered then whether the vision-made flesh would be less than this fleeting glimpse. Would he be disappointed, sorry the dream was eclipsed and replaced with reality? He remembered that he had been torn between speeding up or slowing down, and before he could decide, the vision had entered the ground floor of a funky old Tudor and vanished behind the door, never to be seen in that place again, despite more frequent and increasingly desperate jogs.

      Charlotte Hale, his twilight vision, who months later would spring to life in a university classroom, and who had not, at least for years, disappointed at all.

      Charlotte, who, as it turned out, had been best enjoyed from a distance.

      Charlotte, who, this afternoon, unless he was mistaken, had abandoned a park bench as he approached, just thirty yards from the climbing dome where their granddaughter had been playing with her friends.

      Chapter Four

      First Day Journal: April 28

      “Only God knows the hour of our death!”

      I’m sitting in a coffee shop not far from Biltmore Forest, because I’m not ready to face my empty house for the evening. I’m writing in this journal with hopes those words will stop revolving in my head once I commit them to paper. Reverend Ana spoke them this afternoon, with no idea of their impact. But the first time I heard them was on a day I wish I could forget. In far too many ways that day defines me.

      Maybe in real-time it’s April of my fifty-second year, but in my mind it’s August, and counting backward I think the year must be 1970. I’m ten years old, Maddie’s age, and I’m sure I’ve been sitting in our little country church for at least a century. But, of course, at ten, so much feels that way.

      Ten yards in front of me the preacher slaps his Bible against our pulpit, one my grandmother is particularly proud of, since her own father carved it from a fallen black walnut tree. When I was six Gran pointed out the stump of the “pulpit” tree in a wooded clump not far from her kitchen garden. Sometimes now I go there to think, especially when Hearty comes home drunk, which is most of the time.

      I’m startled by the slapping noise, and only Gran’s withered arm across my chest keeps me from diving under the pew in front of us.

      “Lottie Lou, you sit up now, and no more dozing,” she whispers to me as she hauls me closer. “Else you’ll end up being the ’zample in this fool’s sermon, you get my meaning?”

      The preacher screeches the СКАЧАТЬ