Chapter 26
Aya
Twyla was working, so Emi was the one to drive Aya up into the mountains.
The view was ridiculously beautiful, with the mountains all around and the valley looking picture-perfect.
Aya tried to look away. People were always talking about that view, as if it made up for the sins of the town’s past and present.
The legend was that the earliest white settlers had named the place Zion Creek because they felt that such beauty could only have come from God.
Of course, they weren’t actually the first people there, but the tribal name for the area had been conveniently lost to history.
Just as “Zion Creek” would be lost, if that history were not preserved.
Aya had gone back to using the name Zion Creek when she first moved back home.
It seemed fitting, somehow, to force the now-infamous name back on the place.
But Twyla finally talked her out of it. They had gone to dinner at Chang’s, and Twyla was upfront about how she was going to pay so that Aya would be forced to listen to her.
Aya, who did not have a lot of spare cash, had agreed. But that meant that, even with a table full of delicious food, the meal had gotten off to a difficult start.
“Zion Creek is not accurate,” snapped Twyla. “You make yourself sound like a fool, not a historian.”
Aya simply raised her eyebrows. “You’re not exactly a neutral party. You work for a publication that has the aim of pumping up how supposedly wonderful Love Hollow is.”
Twyla glared. “I hope you’re not implying that I’m bad at my job.”
“No, but part of mine is teaching people what actually happened here. If I go with the postwar-amnesia narrative, accepting the schmaltzy name that the stupid town council thought would be good for tourists, I’m a part of that.”
Twyla put down her chopsticks. She took a long swig of tea then sighed. “Do you also go around talking about Prussia, then?”
Aya was silent for a moment. “The town’s borders didn’t change.”
Twyla nodded. “Okay. But the name did. Whether you like it or not, it was officially changed. So if you were doing what most historians do, you’d call it Zion Creek when you’re talking about the old town and Love Hollow when you’re talking about the modern place.
You know, the place where you’ve spent most of your life. ”
Aya didn’t have a good argument. She added some rice to her bowl then put some of it back.
She’d been asking Mama Chang to make brown rice for years, but it never happened.
The Changs didn’t mind having brown rice at a family dinner, or purple rice, but they were firmly against offering it to customers.
Aya, whose culinary education owed more to fad diets than she would like to admit, always felt guilty eating white rice.
“Aya.” Twyla added some pea shoots to her plate. “You’re not doing yourself any favors here.”
“I don’t care what people think.”
“Well, you should. Because as soon as you call this place Zion Creek, people stop listening to what you have to say. And that’s a damn shame.”
They ate together in silence for a while.
By the end of the meal, they had reached a compromise.
Aya would use Love Hollow when talking about the modern town.
But if she was giving a talk at the museum, she’d use both.
And she wasn’t going to keep herself from using phrases like “the town, which has since been renamed Love Hollow” and “the place formerly known as Zion Creek.”
As Emi drove, Aya thought about how innocent the town looked. Once you got away from it, the infighting and the small-mindedness, it was finally possible to breathe.
For Aya anyway. Emi looked like she was struggling.
“Are you feeling okay?” asked Aya. Her nerves were jangling from the curves in the road.
She had forgotten just how treacherous the route was.
When she was a teenager without a healthy sense of fear—in the form of a fully firing amygdala—driving that way in the night seemed vaguely reasonable.
As an adult, she was acutely conscious of why the Katos refused to host anyone at the cabin if even a minor spell of bad weather was in the forecast.
Of course, she hadn’t checked the forecast. She had been too busy trying to talk Mrs. Irving down. She and the old lady had almost come to blows, and the most she had won was a temporary reprieve.
“I’m fine,” said Emi. “A little tired, but that comes and goes.”
“No nausea?”
“Not yet,” she said. “It’ll probably hit me later.”
Aya had never had any pregnant friends. The closest she had come were a few coworkers who’d had kids, but she had never been particularly interested in what was going on with them.
“Are you ready?”
Emi smiled. “I should be asking you that. You have to meet a cranky celebrity and solve a huge problem today. I don’t have to deliver this baby for almost a year, God willing and Zion Creek don’t rise.”
It had been their old joke back in high school, and Aya found herself smiling. “Noah’s not that cranky. He’s just offended that I think his festival is stupid. Why couldn’t he have done it back in California?”
Emi shook her head. “Probably too expensive back there.”
“Then you charge more,” grumbled Aya. “Of course, how would I know? All I’ve done is run one very small nonprofit into the ground.”
Emi was quiet for a moment. “You didn’t run it into the ground, Aya.”
“But you agree that it’s in the ground.”
The turns had become hairpins, and Emi slowed as she navigated a tricky one. “Okay. But it’s not your job to resurrect the museum, you know.”
“How can I ever leave this place if I don’t?”
They were close to the cabin. Though they’d passed a couple of homes on the way up, there were no near neighbors.
Some of the land was relatively flat, and the Katos had gotten it from the old farmer they used to work for, but everything around it was too steep and rocky for even a tiny dwelling.
Though the drive didn’t take terribly long, it always seemed to end in the middle of nowhere.
As they got out of the car, Aya admitted softly, “I forgot how beautiful it was.”
Spread before them was the whole valley. They could see everything, and the light from the creek glittered in the afternoon sun.
Emi hugged Aya. “Really something, isn’t it? It makes me consider moving back someday.”
Aya pulled away. “You can’t be serious. Has Dr. Flores been trying to recruit you or something?”
Emi grinned. “Yes.”
“And are you coming back?”
Emi turned away from the view. “I don’t know. What does California have for me really?”
Aya frowned, curious that her optimistic friend was sounded glum. “Music festivals?”
“Not even those.”
“Your husband?”
“Yes,” she said. Her voice held emotion that Aya wasn’t quite sure how to place. She would have expected Emi to be missing Charles, especially since they hadn’t seen each other face-to-face since the news of the pregnancy.
“Emi? What’s going on with you?”
Noah chose that moment to appear.