But Lucy hadn’t said any of that. It wasn’t the sort of thing one said to a woman like Alice Hardisson. Billy’s mother had always been kind to her, even though Lucy knew she’d been shocked right down to her patrician toenails when her precious son had run off and married a nobody who’d been migrating north from Mobile, Alabama—a part-time student, part-time lifeguard, with no more background than a swamp rat.

Alice had graciously refrained from offering to buy her off. Instead, she had made the best of her son’s unfortunate marriage, and Lucy would always love her for that. Her father hadn’t left her much—a battered old twelve-string and a lot of wonderful memories—but he had left her a legacy of pride.

When, after three years, her ex-mother-in-law had called to tell her about the cottage she had leased for her companion, Ella Louise, to vacation in while Alice went on a two-month cruise with friends, Lucy’s first impulse had been to hang up.

But then Alice had gone on to tell her about Ella Louise’s tripping over a dog and breaking her hip. “Naturally, a place like that would be out of the question. She’s gone to stay with her sister down in some little town in Florida. So you see, if you don’t take the cottage, it will just go to waste. It was too late to cancel by the time I thought about it.”

“But why me? My goodness, surely you know someone else who would like to use it.”

“My dear child, you must allow me to soothe my conscience by providin’ you with a little vacation, else I’ll never forgive myself for bein’ away when you needed me most.”

And so Lucy, having been taught by the grande dame herself, had graciously allowed herself to be persuaded. There was no real reason why she shouldn’t accept a gift from a friend, she rationalized. The friend could afford it, and obviously wanted to do it. Why else had she gone to the trouble of tracking her down after all this time?

Come to think of it, how had she tracked her down? A forwarding address? Medical records?

Lucy was too tired even to wonder about it now. And too hot. Her backside was permanently bonded to the vinyl seat cover of her car. At least she was a whole lot closer to the end of her journey than when she had set out this morning shortly after daybreak.

Frank had risen early and come over to help her load the car. He’d promised to water her plants and air her apartment when and if the rain ever stopped. She had hugged his two daughters, one of whom was her student, and then hugged Frank, avoiding the question in his eyes the same way she had been avoiding it all year.

She didn’t love Frank Beane. Liked him enormously, adored his motherless children, but as much as she longed for a home and a family, she wasn’t about to take another chance. She had excellent taste in friends, lousy taste in husbands, but at least she had sense enough to learn from her mistakes.

Reaching over, Lucy patted the scuffed hard-shell case that held Pawpaw’s old twelve-string. She had strapped it into the passenger seat with the seat belt, having filled the back seat with books, linens, clothes and groceries.

“One of these days, Pawpaw, I’ll have music on my own back porch and a garden full of okra and tomatoes for gumbo, and maybe even a few cats. One of these days...”

She sighed. Lucy had no use for nostalgia. It was a nonproductive exercise, brought on, no doubt, by smelling salt air again after all these years. This was different from the Gulf Coast, but salt air was salt air, and Lucy was tired.

Pawpaw had been a roughneck. He had worked the oil fields, moving from place to place, but never too far from the Gulf Coast. Lucy, motherless for as long as she could recall, could remember piling into what they used to call the Dooley Trolley, an old camper truck held together with duct tape and baling wire, and setting out in the middle of the night for a new job, a new town—new friends.

Lucy could barely remember her mother, but there’d always been women in her life. Pawpaw—tanned and handsome, with his black-dyed hair and his broad grin, the metallic scent of crude oil that clung to his clothes, usually tempered by a mixture of sweat, bourbon and bay rum—had been like a magnet to women. A good-looking, good-natured man, Clarence Dooley’s only weakness had been an itchy foot and a deep-seated aversion to long-term commitment.

Nearing the tall, spiral-striped lighthouse, where the highway turned west, Lucy squinted against the glare of afternoon sun and thought about Pawpaw and Ollie Mae, one of Pawpaw’s lady friends, sitting on the back stoop after supper, Pawpaw playing his guitar and singing, and Ollie Mae sawing away at her fiddle, the sagging flesh of her upper arm swaying in time with each stroke. Pawpaw had been dead nearly eighteen years now, and Lucy had long since lost track of Ollie Mae and Lillian and the rest of Clarence Dooley’s mistresses.

For one isolated moment she felt utterly alone. And then she shrugged and put it down to no more than being in a strange place, among strangers. Something she should be used to by now.

It would pass. Everything passed, good and bad.

* * *

“You’ll like Maudie and Rich,” said Jerry, the boy from the marina where Lucy had been instructed to leave her car and take a boat out to Coronoke. “Maudie—she’s my cousin on my mother’s side. Well, I reckon if you go back a little ways, on my daddy’s side, too. She used to be—Maudie, that is—she used to caretake over to Coronoke, but then this guy—”