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breath—of course, these are only the wrong ones.
    â€œDr. Matney’s already with his first patient,” the receptionist tells me when I dial Bill’s office at 2:05.
    â€œBut you gave him my message?”
    â€œYes, Mr. Matney, I did.”
    â€œTell him I need to talk now.”
    â€œHe is with a patient, Mr. Matney,” the receptionist says, more brusquely.
    â€œThe patient can wait.”
    â€œI will tell him after he’s finished with the patient.”
    I hang the phone back on its wall mount. I’m one of the last people in the county without a cell phone or a computer, because I have no need for them. I keep the landline only in hopes of one day picking up the phone and hearing my daughter’s voice.

CHAPTER THREE
    W hen I was three and Bill eight, our father fell from a tree stand while hunting in Tennessee. He died during an emergency operation in the county’s hospital. A botched surgery, Grandfather always claimed, though what, if anything, he based this on I never knew. At the time, we lived in Asheville, where my father was finishing up his residency. Our mother had grown up in Winston-Salem and she may have wished to return there to be near her family, but Grandfather convinced her to stay in Sylva. My mother’s relatives, all textile workers, could provide little of what he offered.
    She was the first in her family to get a collegedegree, and it had not been easy. The lines of A’s on her high school report cards drew the resentment of other mill-village kids. Once she was at Greensboro College, extra jobs paid for what scholarships did not. Her first roommate made snide comments about her closet filled with bare hangers; her second offered hand-me-downs, which my mother said was worse. But in her junior year she met my father at a social, and they married during his first semester of medical school.
    Perhaps it was always about loving my father, but how could my mother not have been relieved to know that by marrying a doctor she’d never have to scratch and claw for anything again. There’s nothing ennobling about being poor , she’d once told me. I’ve done what I can to keep you and your brother from learning that firsthand. And then there she was, a widow with two young sons. With an English degree from Greensboro, she could teach, but with Bill and me to raise it would mean teetering bank accounts and past-due bills, what she had known growing up but wanted to spare her children. Is it ungenerous to believe that she accepted her father-in-law’s offer as much for herself as her sons? I don’t think so. Only once, when Bill was thirteen and I eight, did our mother tell us to pack our belongings. We wereleaving Sylva to live in Winston-Salem, she’d said. But we didn’t leave.
    Grandfather never spoke negatively to Bill and me about our mother’s background. He admired her determination, her “grit” in bettering herself. She knew what she had to do and she’d done it, he told Bill and me. Now, as his son’s widow, she need do nothing more than stay home and raise his two grandsons. Or be allowed to, I later realized, for when Grandfather died during my junior year at Wake Forest, my mother altered her life radically. My grandfather had willed the house to her and enough money to live comfortably, but he was barely in the ground when she began working part-time at the library and then full-time. She soon was dating a retired high school guidance counselor, which made me believe that part of Grandfather’s pact with her included not seeking a second husband.
    You make choices in life and you must accept the consequences of those choices. Bill and I had heard Grandfather’s maxim often growing up, occasioned by everything from a toothache to a low grade. War confirmed this view, he said, and told us of a fellow soldier whose falling asleep on guard duty allowed a German to get close enough to toss a