Carolina Moon

enjoyed decorating their space. With the right advertising and clever displays she would draw them into her shop.
    And they would buy.
    Were there any living well in those quiet homes she’d known as a child? Any who might remember the thin young girl who’d come to school with bruises? Would they remember she’d sometimes known things she wasn’t supposed to know?
    Memories were short, Tory reminded herself. And even if some remembered, she would find a way to use it to promote her store.
    The houses elbowed closer together as she approached the town line, as if they were anxious for company. Into her mind flashed an image of the far side, where the narrow whip of the river was the border of Progress. In her youth, the houses that slipped and slithered down into the holler had been small and dark, with leaky roofs and rusted trucks that most often stood on chipped cinder blocks. A place were dogs snarled and leaped viciously at the ends of their chains. Where the women hung out dingy laundry while children sat on patchy grass that was mostly dirt.
    Some of the men farmed to eke out a living, and some of them simply lived on beer and mead. As a child she’d been one shaky step above that fate. And even as a child she’d feared losing the balance and tumbling into the holler, where daily bread was served with exhaustion.
    She saw the church steeple first. The town boasted four, or had. Still, nearly everyone she’d known had belonged to the Baptist church. She’d sat, countless hours, on one of the hard pews listening, listening desperately to the sermon because her father would quiz her on the content that night before supper.
    If she didn’t respond well, the punishment was hard and it was quick.
    She hadn’t been inside a church of any kind in eight years.
    Don’t think about it, she ordered herself. Think about now. But now, she saw, was very much like then. It seemed to her very little had changed inside the edges of Progress.
    Deliberately, she turned onto Live Oak Drive to cruise through the oldest residential section of town. The homes here were large and gracious, the trees old and leafy. Her uncle had moved here a few years before she’d left Progress. On his wife’s money, her father had said brittlely.
    Tory hadn’t been allowed to visit there, and even now felt a twinge of guilty panic just driving by the lovely old white brick home with its flowering shrubs and sparkling windows.
    Her uncle would be at work now, managing the bank as he’d managed it nearly as long as she could remember. And though she had a great deal of affection for her aunt, Tory wasn’t in the mood for Boots Mooney’s fluttering hands and whispery voice.
    She wove through the streets, past smaller homes and a small apartment complex that hadn’t existed sixteen years before. She lifted her eyebrows at a corner convenience store that had sprung up in bright reds and yellows out of the old Progress Drive-In.
    The high school had an addition, and there was a charming little park just off the square where there’d once been a line of crumbling row houses. There were new young trees planted among the old soldiers and graceful flowers spilling out of concrete pots.
    It all seemed prettier, cleaner, fresher than she remembered. She wondered how much would turn out to be the same under that new coat of varnish.
    As she turned onto Market, she was ridiculously pleased to see Hanson’s was still standing, still wore the same battered old sign, and its front window remained patchworked with flyers and billboards.
    The sweet childhood taste of Grape Nehi immediately filled her mouth, her throat, and made her smile.
    The beauty salon had changed hands, she noted. Lou’s Beauty Shoppe was now called Hair Today. But the Market Street Diner stood where it had always stood, and it seemed to her the same old men wearing the same overalls were loitering outside to gossip.
    Midway down the block, tucked between Rollins Paint and Hardware and The Flower Basket was the old dry-goods store. That, Tory thought, as she pulled to the curb, would be her change.
    She climbed out of the car and stepped into the thick midday heat. The outside of the building was exactly as she remembered. The old clinker bricks cobbled together with the mortar gray as smoke between. The window was high and wide and just now coated with dust and street grime. But she would fix that.
    The door was glass as well, and cracked. The landlord, she determined, taking