Free The Lost Saints of Tennessee by Amy Franklin-Willis

and a piece of the Appalachians.
    The last time I went to Virginia I was eighteen. Navigating was left to the train engineer. As the familiar hills of Tennessee disappeared out the window, it hit me that I’d left home, left my brother and my girlfriend, to live with a relative I’d never met, in a state I’d never set foot in, to attend a university where I wouldn’t know a single person. Today, I’m just as scared. Scared of what I’ll find there. Scared they’ll tell me to turn around and go home. More scared nothing will be better there, either. And then what? Codeine take two?
    The sound of Dolly Parton’s voice croons out at me from the truck’s radio. She’s singing about if teardrops were pennies and heartaches were gold. After climbing steadily on Highway 321, I turn in to a scenic pullout. Dad used to stop at every one of them on family car trips. Said it broke up the drive. Mother didn’t have time for them.
    â€œCarter, we’re running late,” she’d say. “We don’t need to be reading signs and looking at things.” Daddy would just wave a hand at her and let all of us kids pile out and look.
    My truck is the only vehicle in the parking lot. From the bottom of the duffel bag, I dig out the good-bye notes written back at the Logland Inn. The noise of the truck door slamming stops a woodpecker’s rat-a-tat-tat on a nearby birch. Tucker goes off to the bushes to do his business. The strong smell of damp earth mixed with crushed pine needles releases under my feet as I walk.
    The September morning cloaks the mountains in mist. The sign says the Cherokees called this region Shaconage, which means “place of blue smoke.” Looking out across the forest of beech and birch with Fraser fir and red spruce up higher, the Cherokees got it right. A haze hangs in the lightest hue of a robin’s egg and dances like gossamer above it all. The view appears so fragile that if I turn my back it may all disappear, evaporating into the mist.
    Carter should be here to see this. He would have said, Let’s move right here, make a camp and hunt for our food. Like Huck and Jim did. During the summer we turned twelve, we worked our way through the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At night I read to Carter in our bed by flashlight, and by day we’d collapse under the shade of the biggest oak tree we could find and read until Mother called us in for dinner.
    Maybe I should have become a park ranger and gotten us a little cabin in the woods where Carter wouldn’t have had to deal with many people. I could have taken Jackie and the girls. My brother might still be alive if I’d done that.
    It seems like the wanting to see him or tell him about my day should be done. Ten years is a while. Jackie says you never stop missing someone you love. This is the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard and I hope to God she is wrong.
    But Jackie is rarely wrong. Marrying Curtis Baxter was a mistake. She thinks he can give her what I couldn’t, which, according to her, is the love and attention she deserves. But what she thinks is love is no more than Curtis wanting to add one more precious thing to his collection of Mustangs and vintage Smith & Wessons.
    I tear the three notes into pieces, throwing them over the edge. It isn’t clear to me whether I will try the final exit route again. It won’t be today. And I’m pretty sure it won’t be tomorrow. The wind grabs hold and carries them out toward the mountains, pieces of confetti dancing snowlike among the trees.
    A pristine Cadillac pulls in beside my truck and a man wearing a long-sleeved shirt and pants with suspenders gets out. He blows his nose with a red bandana pulled from a back pocket.
    I nod hello as I walk back to the truck, ready to move on.
    â€œHell of a view, isn’t it?” he says.
    My hand stops over the door handle. “Yes, sir.