“ACTUALLY, my degree’s not in French,” Maggie Sorrentino told me, “but in international relations.”

People say asinine things when they’re feeling like asses, and I felt like one that day. I don’t think it was caused by what happened when the alarm went off—that, after all, had ended on a high note—but by my reaction to Maggie’s presence. Everything about her suggested that she was beyond the means of people like me. “You studied French to become more international?”

Her voice, when she answered, was unnaturally quiet, as if she were working hard to restrain it. If she hadn’t been smiling, I would’ve thought my stupid question had angered her. “I guess I initially studied French because the man I wanted to marry was studying French. Of course he studied international relations, too, which is how we met.”

We were sitting together at a table in the school cafeteria, off to one side by ourselves. Apparently, everybody else had also noticed her car the day before. Park a piece of equipment like that in the faculty lot of a public high school, especially in a place as poor as Loring, and it’s going to create a certain amount of distance between you and your colleagues, as will the kind of jewelry she wore. The one piece missing was a wedding ring. Yet when he introduced her, Ramsey had called her Mrs. Maggie Sorrentino.

“Your husband,” I said, “did he move back here with you?”

“My husband’s dead.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, believe me, I am, too.”

“When did that happen?”

“Almost eighteen months ago. He had cancer of the esophagus, though he never smoked and barely drank. People tell me it’s unusual to develop that unless you’re a heavy smoker and drinker. But then it’s unusual, too, at the age of fifty, which is how old he was when he found out about it.”

“What did he do for a living?”

“The last few years of his life, he taught public policy at Duke. Prior to that, he worked for CNN.”

“You lived in Atlanta?”

“Close by. And then, as I said, we moved back to North Carolina.”

“Do you have any children?”

She’d brought her lunch in a brown paper sack. So far I’d seen her consume a granola bar and three or four celery sticks, her mouth barely moving while she chewed, and the whole time she kept looking right at me. Now she withdrew a small carton of Dannon yogurt and said, “Maybe you could ask me something else.”

I’d thought about her and Eugene and their parents a lot over the past day. Ellis had provided the crucial bit of information that caused my synapses to fire: namely, that her mother had been killed the night riots erupted at Ole Miss after the courts ordered the enrollment of a black student named James Meredith and folks poured in from all over the South to defend segregation, eventually forcing JFK to send in a huge number of troops. Ellis also told me that Arlan Calloway, though arrested for murder, was never indicted. When I asked how that could be, he said, “Supposedly, he shot his wife in self-defense.” He took Maggie and Eugene away, and his parents, who’d lived there most of their lives, left as well.

Finding her response to my question about children plenty strange, I decided that maybe she herself would prove rather odd. But I went ahead and asked, “So where did you and Eugene and your dad go when you moved away from Loring?”

She spooned some yogurt into her mouth and acted as if she needed to ponder this before replying. Something I’d learn about Maggie—and something I’d come to like—was that it violated her nature to answer any question quickly. “First,” she finally said, “we went west. All the way to Needles, California. My dad bought a gas station that went broke. Have you ever heard of anybody who couldn’t sell gas in Needles? Half the people who come there are running out of it, and the other half are scared they’re going to. But there were a lot of established stations, and in all fairness to my father, the last guy to own ours had gone broke, too. That’s why he agreed to sell.

“After that happened, we picked up and headed back across the country to Virginia. That’s where my grandparents had moved, and where my grandmother was originally from. My father got a job at the Radford Arsenal, helping produce propellants for submarines. He died there, in fact, during my first year of college. One day a bunker exploded. They never figured out exactly what happened, nor did they ever find a trace of either of the men who’d been inside, one of whom was Dad.”

“Jesus.”

“I imagine you’d like to know about my brother?”

By now I was scared to ask. Her dad had shot her mom, then been blown to smithereens, and her husband had died of cancer. And there was still the question of children, which she’d told me not to pose.

“Nothing bad happened to Gene,” she said. “Just lots of good things. He’s a successful real-estate agent in Fort Worth, and he and his wife have four daughters between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. Those girls—well, they’re all gems.” I figured maybe she’d pull some pictures from her purse, but she didn’t. Instead, she ate another spoonful of yogurt and, while continuing to look at me, tipped her chin up ever so slightly. “You’re probably wondering,” she said, “why I’d come back to this particular place. Given what occurred here, I mean.”

You have to understand that Loring, Mississippi, isn’t the kind of town people come back to, for any reason whatsoever. It is, in fact, the kind they leave. Very few of those I grew up with are still here, and most of them own large chunks of land that have belonged to their families forever. New arrivals are almost always drawn by the promise of low-wage jobs, either in the catfish industry or at the Wal-Mart Supercenter or the big Dollar General distributorship that opened a while back. Around here, true wealth comes coated with glue, and it’s always stuck to the same sets of hands. “I guess I am curious about that,” I said. “Though I don’t know how I’d react if something similar happened in my family, because it didn’t.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. A couple of months ago, I sat up in bed one morning and noticed how perfectly gorgeous the day was. I’m not trying to brag, but I own a nice house in the countryside between Durham and Chapel Hill, and I lavished a lot of care, during the last few years, on my garden. My bedroom there has a big window, and I looked out at the sunlight flooding my roses and heard the water trickling from the fountain my husband had built for me and it was all just perfect, except for one thing: I suddenly felt that if I spent one more moment in that house, surrounded by all that beauty, I’d go completely mad. I checked into the Carolina Inn that afternoon, stayed there for two nights while I arranged to have the place looked after, then I packed a couple of bags and started driving.

“I went to Radford and visited the cemetery where my grandparents are buried, then drove aimlessly across the country, intending to end up in Needles, where I’d turn around and come back. I kept stopping in small towns, and some of them made a big impression on me. Especially one in Kansas. I ate a sandwich in this general store where they sold all kinds of things related to farming, including seed. I listened to what people were saying, but none of it made any sense, and I finally figured out why. It was because they all knew so much about one another that they’d lapsed into a kind of shorthand. It might as well have been a foreign language. And I realized that nobody on the face of the earth knew me well enough to do that.

“I finally did go to Needles, where our gas station had been turned into an espresso stand, a faux Starbucks that was doing booming business—probably because there wasn’t a real Starbucks nearby. And it just fascinated me that my dad’s undoing could be the source of someone else’s success.

“When I started back east, I knew I had to see Loring. So I got here a couple of weeks ago and checked into that motel across from McDonald’s. I guess I expected to stay just a couple of days before going back to North Carolina. I wanted to see the house I used to live in, and to see if I could find out where my mother’s buried. The first morning I went out and bought the Weekly Times and spotted an ad for someone who could speak French well enough to teach it. The ad sounded sort of desperate, so I found myself thinking, Why not? I went in and applied for the job, and when Ramsey gave it to me I rented a house.”

In the face of such honesty, I experienced a range of emotions. And as odd as it may sound, given that personal tragedy had provoked her actions, envy was one of them. I couldn’t imagine being able to leave home like that and go wherever whimsy led me. This seemed to me the kind of thing only a young person would do, though I hadn’t done anything of the sort when I was young. So for the second time that day, I made a grossly inappropriate comment. “Well,” I said, “if you were trying to escape beauty, you’ve come to the right place.”

That afternoon, retrieving a book from my car that I’d promised to loan one of my honor students, I ran into Ellis Buchanan, who’d parked in the space next to mine and was carrying a beaten-up hardcover of All the President’s Men. He brought the same book with him at the beginning of each school year, for the first of his regular Tuesday-afternoon lectures to the journalism class.

“Going to make a few points about the freedom of the press?”

“No.” He shut his door. “Making the point that the press has never been less free than it is right now.”

“I admire your sentiments, but for your own personal edification, you might want to refresh yourself on the Alien and Sedition Acts.”

“I’m beyond edification,” he said before going inside. “When you’re as old as I am, you will be, too.”