Chapter 15 #2
She falls asleep somewhere north of Gainesville. I drive the rest of the way with her hand in mine, the windows cracked just enough to let in the clean scent of rain-washed road and wet leaves, and the mountains waiting ahead as if they remember me.
She wakes up when I turn onto a road outside Hiawassee. Her eyes open slowly. For a second, she doesn’t move. Then she lifts her head from the seat and looks around.
The mountains are closer now. The sky has cleared to a hard, bright blue, with the last storm clouds retreating behind us in slow, gray heaps. The road curves between trees and small houses, with glimpses of water flashing through the gaps.
Andi sits up. “Where are we?”
“Almost there.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is if you’re patient.” I throw her a grin over my shoulder.
“I’m famously patient.”
I glance at her.
She gives me a look back. “Fine. I’m strategically patient.”
“That’s closer.”
She turns toward the window as the lake comes into view.
Lake Chatuge opens between the trees, blue, clear, and quiet under the afternoon sun.
The storm never made it this far, or maybe it passed before us, leaving everything polished.
The water catches the light in pieces. Mountains rise around it, layered and steady, a view that makes talking feel optional.
Andi doesn’t say anything. That tells me everything.
I pull into a gravel turnout beside a roadside stand with a faded sign that reads PEACHES, TOMATOES, BOILED PEANUTS, ICE-COLD DRINKS. It looks almost exactly as I remember it, though the roof is newer and the old cooler by the door has been replaced.
An older man sits in the shade beside a box fan that’s losing its fight with the heat. He looks up when we get out. For one second, his eyes narrow. Then his face breaks open.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he says. “Luke Woods.”
I smile before I can stop myself. “Mr. Hanley.”
Andi looks between us, interested now.
Mr. Hanley pushes himself up from the chair, slower than I remember but with the same sharp eyes. “Look at you. Bigger than a bull and twice as ugly.”
“There’s the welcome I was hoping for.”
“You got famous and forgot where the good peaches come from.”
“Never forgot.”
“Just took you ten years to prove it.”
“Closer to twelve.”
“That does not help your case, son.”
Andi steps closer, her smile tucked at the corner of her mouth.
Mr. Hanley turns to her. “You must be the reason he remembered manners.”
“She tries,” I say.
Andi holds out her hand. “Andi Morgan.”
He takes it gently. “Pleasure, ma’am. You want peaches, don’t let him pick. He always went for the biggest ones as a boy, and big don’t mean sweet.”
“I was efficient.”
“You were greedy.”
“I was growing.”
“You were twelve and eating me out of profit.”
Andi laughs. Not the controlled one. Not the public one. A real laugh. The sound hits me square in the chest.
Mr. Hanley looks pleased with himself and points toward the crates. “You pick from that box. Freestone. Sweet enough to make you confess things you didn’t do.”
Andi walks to the peaches and starts choosing with the same care she brings to everything, even fruit from a roadside stand. I watch her lift one to her nose, inhale, and smile faintly.
Mr. Hanley leans toward me. “That one’s too good for you.”
“I know she is.”
He grunts. “At least you ain’t stupid.”
“No, sir.”
“Your daddy been back here lately?”
The question lands soft, but it lands. I look at the peaches. At Andi turning one in her hand.
“Not in a long time,” I say.
Mr. Hanley studies me for a second. He knows enough not to ask more. Mountain people can be nosy as sin, but the good ones know where the fence line sits.
“Well,” he says, “you tell him I asked when you see him.”
“I will.”
He lets that be enough.
We leave with a paper bag of peaches, two glass-bottle sodas, a container of boiled peanuts I do not remember agreeing to, and Mr. Hanley’s repeated instruction that Andi should not let me choose produce without supervision.
Back in the truck, she sets the peaches carefully in her lap.
“You were greedy?”
“I was twelve.”
“That feels like a yes wearing a hat.”
“I was a growing boy who needed food.”
“You were eating that man’s profits.”
I pull back onto the road. “I brought him business today.”
“You bought six peaches and peanuts you didn’t ask for.”
“He upsold me.”
“He bullied you.”
“He has earned the right.”
She looks at me, softer now. “You came here as a kid.”
“Every summer for a while.”
“With your family?”
“Mostly with my dad.” I keep my eyes on the road. “Sometimes Brandon came. Sometimes all of us. But Dad and I came up here the most.”
She doesn’t rush into the space that opens. That’s one of the things I love about her. She knows the difference between an invitation and a wound.
“What did you do?” she asks.
“Fished. Swam. Climbed things I shouldn’t have climbed. Got sunburned. Ate too much. Skipped rocks badly.”
“Badly?”
“I’ve improved.”
“I’m excited to judge that for myself.”
“You’re awfully confident for someone who hasn’t seen my technique.”
“Luke, you just admitted you were bad at it. I’m not ignoring useful intelligence.”
I look over. She’s smiling. The day is already worth whatever Mack thinks he accomplished.
The ice cream shop sits near the lake, small and white with a green metal roof and a line of hanging ferns along the porch. It smells like waffle cones before we even reach the door. Inside, the air conditioning is heroic in the heat of the day. Andi stops just inside and closes her eyes.
“I may live here now.”
“You haven’t tasted the ice cream yet.”
“That’s not necessary. The air conditioning has proposed, and I’m considering it.”
I order peach for both of us because there are moments when choice is an illusion. She gives me a look when I do it.
“What if I wanted chocolate?”
“You didn’t.”
“But what if I did?”
“You can have mine too.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I know.”
The girl behind the counter recognizes neither of us, which is a small mercy I feel deeper than I expect. She hands over two cups of peach ice cream with plastic spoons and tells us to have a good day, like we are simply people buying ice cream near a lake.
Outside, we sit at a picnic table under the porch fan. Andi takes one bite and goes still. I wait. She looks down at the cup.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s offensive.”
“Little bit.”
“No, I mean it. This is rude. Ice cream shouldn’t be allowed to be this good without warning people first.”
“I tried to prepare you.”
“You did not. You ordered for me like a tyrant and then stood there looking smug.”
“I’m not smug.”
“You are mountain smug. It’s a very specific variant.”
I take a bite of mine. “Mountain smug sounds respectable.”
“It’s not.”
We eat in silence for a few minutes, watching a couple of kids chase each other near the parking lot while their mother tries to pay for three cones and keep the smallest one from licking the service window. A boat moves across the lake in the distance, leaving a soft white line behind it.
Andi has peach ice cream on the corner of her mouth. I reach over and wipe it away with my thumb. She keeps her gaze trained on me longer than ususal.
“What?” I ask.
“You look different here.”
I sit back. “Different how?”
“Younger,” she says. Then thinks better of it. “Not young. Just… less braced.”
I look toward the water. That’s probably true. “I didn’t realize how much I remembered until we got here.”
“Good memories?”
“Mostly.”
She waits.
I turn the spoon in my hand. “My dad and I used to come up here when things were loud at home.”
“Loud how?”
“Not bad. Just loud. Business, bills, family stuff. Expectations. He never said that was why we came, but I figured it out later. We’d fish half the day, and he’d talk more up here than he ever did at home.”
“What did he talk about?”
“Nothing important, which means it was probably the important stuff. How to tell if a storm was coming by the way the wind shifted. How to clean a fish. Why you don’t buy peaches by size.” I glance at her. “Hanley was involved in that lesson.”
“I assumed.”
“He told me once that a man ought to have one place where nobody needed him to be impressive.”
Her expression changes. Just slightly. “He said that?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you listen?”
“At twelve? No. At twelve, I thought impressive was the whole point.”
“And now?”
I look out at the lake, at the light moving on water clear enough to show the stones near the shore. “Now I think he was trying to give me a place to put everything down before I knew I was carrying anything.”
Andi’s hand moves across the table and covers mine.
I turn my palm up. She holds on. The fan turns overhead, stirring hot air into something almost gentle.
For a while, neither of us says anything.
The silence doesn’t feel empty. It feels kept.
When we finish the ice cream, I throw the cups away and take her back to the truck.
She looks at the road ahead. “Are we going to your place where nobody needs you to be impressive?”
“Yeah,” I say. “We are.”
The cove is still there. I almost don’t believe it until I see it.
The road down is narrower than I remember, with gravel and red dirt, weeds brushing the sides of the truck. At the end, there’s a small clearing tucked away from the main lake traffic, shaded by a massive oak that leans toward the water like it has spent a hundred years keeping watch.
No dock now. Or rather, what remains of one. A few old posts. Weathered boards near the shore. Enough to confirm I didn’t invent it.
The water is clear all the way down to the stones. Andi gets out slowly, taking it in.
“This is beautiful.”
“Yeah.”
“No, Luke.” She looks at me. “This is really beautiful.”
I grab the blanket from behind the seat, the cooler I packed badly and without enough ice, and the paper bag of peaches. We spread everything beneath the oak where the shade is deep and cool compared to the blazing afternoon beyond it.