The County Line

Chapter 1: 101

The first thing I remember is the light.

Not the building. Not the bricked windows or the sagging screen door. Just one bare bulb burning above the entrance, pale and steady in the North Georgia dark.

There were no insects circling it.

At the time, neither Daniel nor I thought much of that. We noticed it, perhaps, but only in the quiet way the mind stores details it does not yet understand.

We had driven up from Atlanta on a Friday afternoon in October, following a narrow highway into the mountains. Daniel had recently separated from his wife, and I had recently buried my father. Neither of us said the trip was meant to fix anything. We called it camping because men our age often give simple names to the ways they run from grief.

Daniel brought a tent he had not used since college. I brought my father’s old green Coleman stove, still smelling faintly of kerosene and burned coffee.

For most of the drive, Daniel talked about ordinary things. He complained about his lawyer. He wondered whether the Braves would make the postseason. Every few miles, he drummed his fingers against the dashboard in time with a song only he seemed to hear.

I watched the mountains gather around us.

My father had loved those roads. When I was a boy, he used to point at abandoned houses hidden among the trees and invent stories about the people who had lived there.

“Every empty house is still somebody’s home,” he once told me.