Called Home to Peachtree Bluff

Prologue

AS HUMANS, WE ARE WIRED to forget. Flight delays, bad restaurants, even childbirth. We go back. Play on a gentler repeat. Somewhere in the murky gray matter of our brains, the memory softens.

Memories, I thought. I had millions of them with this family of mine, all sitting on the end of my dock on this stunning morning, across the street from the white clapboard house that had been my grandmother’s, that had been perched here, overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway in my beloved Peachtree Bluff, Georgia, since before the revolution.

Instinctively, I put my fingers up to my neck, to the elegant necklace with four diamonds—family heirlooms discovered inside my husband Jack’s house—linked on a chain, a symbol of the three daughters I loved so much and me.

We were together in person right now, together in spirit always.

My youngest daughter Emerson threw her head back and laughed, looking so much like her father, my late husband Carter, that my stomach gripped.

Some days, I could forget the horror of his leaving me a widow in my forties with a seventeen-, fifteen-, and nine-year-old to raise.

It was still sad, still hard. But it wasn’t quite so raw.

My son-in-law Adam, who was currently living in my guesthouse with my middle daughter Sloane and my two darling grandsons, AJ and Taylor, high-fived Emerson.

I could go weeks now without thinking about the time when Adam was MIA in Iraq, those weeks when we wondered if the world as we knew it would ever be the same.

My precious granddaughter Vivi was leaning into her boyfriend Tyler, the one who, God bless him, had rescued her when she went missing during Hurricane Pearl.

Okay, so that one was fresher; I still thought every day about what could have happened to her, to all of us, really.

But she was so much like her mother, my eldest, headstrong and fiercely independent Caroline, who was also, in a wild contrast, perhaps the most maternal of all.

One of her arms was wrapped around her five-year-old son Preston, the other hand resting on Sloane’s belly, just waiting for a baby kick.

My three girls and my oldest granddaughter were each wearing their necklaces too, carbon copies of mine, gifts from Jack, connecting our families through time. This way, we were always close to one another’s hearts.

Moments like this, where everything seemed just about perfect, were what allowed me to carry on.

The haziness around the edges of my hardest moments allowed me to breathe in and out, put one foot in front of the other, and live a life that can, if we let it, feel like a constant source of danger and turmoil.

This town—my refuge from the danger and turmoil, the place that had enveloped my girls and me after the tragedy of 9/11 stole my husband, that had taken us in when we literally had nowhere else to turn—helps too.

I snuggle up beside Jack now, the man I have loved since I was sixteen and my summer wardrobe consisted of a yellow polka-dot bikini and a pair of jean shorts.

He squeezes my arm, reminding me that he has loved me all that time too. That he still does.

I take a deep breath as everyone around me laughs.

“You okay, Mom?” Caroline asks, breaking me out of my thoughts.

I take another deep breath. “I can smell them,” I say.

“Smell what?” Jack asks, amused.

“The fall ions in the air.”

They all laugh.

“Mom can always smell when fall is coming,” Emerson says.

“A person cannot smell fall,” Adam retorts.

“No,” I say, inhaling again, an ever-so-slightly metallic yet very pleasant smell. “I can. Can’t you feel that? The way the humidity has just been sucked away?”

Emerson, my actress, nods animatedly, her entire person lighting up. “It has, hasn’t it?”

That’s how it always is, this glorious change of season. Humidity, humidity, humidity, and then—bam!—the clearest, most perfect air.

“The only thing I can smell,” a voice I would know anywhere says from behind me, “is this.” My soon-to-be son-in-law Kyle, once just my favorite barista, now the man charged with the care and keeping of my most emotional daughter—the one who is so clearly her perfect match I sometimes wonder how I didn’t see it all along—has an old converted wooden Coke crate hanging from a leather strap around his neck.

From one of the slots, he pulls out a stainless steel cup embossed with PEACHTREE PERK.

“I helped Keith get the fall lineup in order before we head back to New York,” he said.

Kyle still owns Peachtree Perk, but his cousin Keith—who, bless him, doesn’t have the good sense God gave a squirrel—runs it for him while Kyle and Emerson are in New York filming her current show.

Kyle has made no bones about the fact that he would follow his Emmy, and their beautiful little girl Carter, to the ends of the earth.

Which is all one really wants in a son-in-law if you ask me.

I push open the slider on the lid, inhale, and squeal.

It is official: We have arrived in my favorite season.

(To be fair, I say that about every season.) This handmade, hand-delivered concoction from the best coffee shop in the world has confirmed it: It is fall.

The tourists have gone home. It is still warm, but not sweltering.

The water is calm, the swimming is perfect, and, if I squint, I could swear that the leaves of the maple across the street in my front yard are just starting to tinge yellow around the edges.

The only negative to fall is it means that my Caroline, Vivi, and Preston, who spend the whole summer here, go back to New York.

And my Emerson, Kyle, and Carter, who have been here every possible moment this summer, will be firmly rooted in Manhattan until Emerson is finished filming.

But Sloane and her boys will still be here.

And there is work to be done at my design shop, things I have put off.

And, besides, I love visiting my girls in New York in the fall.

There is a season to everything under the sun, I remind myself, trying to think of Labor Day and Halloween and Thanksgiving and Emerson’s wedding, when we will all be together again, so I don’t feel sad.

I take a sip of my drink, holding it in my mouth, savoring it, hugging the cup to my chest. I swallow and whisper, “Peachtree spice.”

Everyone around me has gotten their cups, and they are all oohing and aahing over the fall deliciousness in their hands.

“Have you finished packing?” Jack whispers.

I put my hand on top of his, a gentle shushing.

Because the golden light is so picture-perfect over the water that words will only ruin it.

I sip my coffee, feel the pure, liquid joy of it.

The coffee, the sunrise, the water, this man, this dock, this family.

So many of the things I love most are right here, right now. Most of them, really.

I don’t remember yet that it is hurricane season, that a hurricane two years ago changed our family forever.

I don’t consider that this glorious golden fall will give way, in a few more months, to the chill and dark of winter.

I avoid the fact that my children will get on planes to go back to where they came from this afternoon and that I will get on a plane with my husband—the one I pledged my life to only a few years ago, but who has held my heart for decades—in a few days.

He says the trip at the end of the week is only for an interview, a discussion, a consulting gig of sorts for a company that is trying to expand and then sell out, like he did with his business—before he retired, that is.

We travel plenty, but I feel so uneasy about this plan, about leaving the place I feel most centered, most alive.

I feel like there is something unknown lying in wait in this trip, something that could change the safety and sanctity of everything I have always felt here, with my three girls, all grown up now, on this dock.

I take a deep breath and, as if he is reading my mind, Jack whispers, “It’s just a meeting, Ansley. Don’t make so much of it.”

His words are soothing, but my stomach turns at the thought of another huge change in a life that has been marked and marred by it.

We have been in similar places before. And I remind myself that perhaps this feeling is induced only by how haunted I am by the past.

Because, yes, indeed, we are wired to forget.

Even still, as Jack puts his arm around me and pulls me close, I don’t so much think about as feel the remnants of how hard we fought to be together.

I remind myself of the enormous amount he has sacrificed for me.

I look up at him, remember that I never want to be without him.

I look back at the sun-drenched sky, at the way it blazes pink and orange, the birds flying across.

I take a mental picture. Of the calm sea, the sky bursting into color, the smiling faces of the people I love with a ferocity I can’t put into words. This is a morning I want to remember.