Free A Place We Knew Well by Susan Carol McCarthy

their dogs in silence, basking in a patch of sunlight breaking through the clouds. Then Charlotte jumped up, intent on buying an “atomic mint chocolate” ice cream cone at a nearby stand.
    “Want one?” she asked, joining the line.
    “No, thanks.”
    Ignorance is bliss, right? he thought, surveying the crowd. But what about Sarah? She wasn’t ignorant, not by a long shot. So what in the world was
she
doing here? Seventeen years and there were still parts of his wife that mystified him. Her moods, for instance. One day, she could be the queen of optimism and organization, blithely moving from household task to community project to school committee meeting. All poise and polish. The next, she could be laid low, composure fractured by the less than perfect, the unpredictable, or some other thing that was completely outside her control.
    Charlotte had reached the counter and was giving him a thumbs-up. Avery thumbed her back, wondering what it was Sarah expected him to say to Charlotte. Was last night’s upset, all her talk about “options” this morning, really about Emilio? Or was it that Charlotte had made up her mind without consulting her mother? Or anyone else, for that matter? And what was wrong with that? Truth was, he loved Charlotte’s decisiveness, her desire to go her own way, to dream her own dreams. It showed character, didn’t it? And reflected well on her parents: Without those same qualities, Sarah might never have left Tuscaloosa. And I’d still be a dirt farmer, fighting bad weather and boll weevils!
    Charlotte plopped back down beside him. “Yummm,” she said, licking her cone.
    “It’s turning your tongue green,” he teased her.
    “Maybe I’m radioactive!” she shot back, crossing her eyes and flicking her tongue like a lizard.
    They walked out through the still-incoming crowd. In the parking lot, Charlotte tapped the truck’s front fender and said, “Wake up, Otto! Time to make like an atom and split.”
    Firing the ignition, Avery said, “I thought it was, ‘Make like a tree and leave’?”
    “Well, yeah, if you’re
twelve.
”
    “Oh, got it. So let’s, uhm…make like an engine and run? Make like a gasket and blow? Or how ’bout, make like a pedal and put it to the metal?”
    “Save it for the station, Dad.”
    Wheeling left on East Colonial Drive, Avery announced, “Scenic route!” A few miles later, he turned right on Route 436, through T. G. Lee Dairy’s cow-spotted pastures to Bearhead Road, the northern perimeter of McCoy Air Force Base.
    —
    T HE BARRICADE SURPRISED HIM.
    A makeshift collection of sawhorses, guard shack, military jeeps, and uniformed air police blocked the normally public road 250 yards ahead of the main gate. Avery pulled the truck off onto the grassy shoulder, behind a gaggle of others who had done the same thing. Up ahead, a hundred yards from the barricade, a cluster of men, civilians, were gathered around a white Dodge pickup. He decided to walk up and ask what was going on.
    “Want to come?” he asked Charlotte.
    “Sure!” she said, already half out the door.
    The circle of onlookers stood listening to a large man in denim overalls and mud-caked farm boots. His milk-colored truck sported the red T. G. Lee Dairy logo and held an assortment of field tools in the back. He wore a red T. G. Lee cap and the dark tan of a man who spent the bulk of his time outdoors. He’d pulled a stalk of sweetgrass from a nearby patch and held it between his lips. The trio of lime-green leaves at its tip quaked as he talked.
    When Avery and Charlotte approached, the dairyman eyed Avery’s starched white shirt, his Sunday suit pants, and shiny wingtips, and called, “Afternoon, Reverend. How was church?”
    Avery held up innocent hands. “I’m a mechanic, not a minister. Just out for a drive on my day off.”
    “Come to see your hard-earned tax dollars at work?”
    The dairyman reached into his truck’s open window, pulled out a pair of black