Caroline unfolded her legs from beneath her because one of them had fallen asleep, just as her younger sister had, mercifully. She’d been holding her book open with two hands, only her fingertips visible over the tops of the pages. A few days ago her nails were shiny and pink but now were cracked where she’d chewed them; entire chunks of lacquer in fact had gone missing, the natural consequences of an active twelve-year-old girl with a foot still firmly rooted in childhood proclivities. Her father slowed the clunky family sedan and prepared to pull off the highway.

Almost there, he said, just another half hour or so. She didn’t acknowledge him, absorbed as she’d been in her novel, but instead glanced out the window at the changed landscape that had been dotted with Jersey cattle and decaying billboards a short time earlier. Now they had reached relative civilization and arrived in heavy traffic at the bottom of the exit ramp; the car went bumpety-bump-bump over rough pavement warped and pocked by heavy rigs. Caroline turned a page down at the corner to mark her place, and blew and then popped a gigantic, stinky bubble gum orb. She glanced over at her sister riding shotgun in a booster seat, who briefly awakened, shifted, and then promptly fell asleep once more.

From her vantage point, she could observe her mother in profile and the soft, unruly curls at her neck that escaped the confines of her hair tie. For the first time, she noticed crepey skin coming along her jawline, only just, and considered this condition, wondering how she would look when she reached this moment in her own life. Not like that, she hoped. Her mother leaned forward and rearranged some detritus into a canvas bag at her ankles, and then turned her head away to watch businesses passing them by. She was wearing a garish purple sweatshirt she had modified by removing the crewneck and then whip-stitching it, with matching joggers. Caroline found the entire package—the outfit, the hairdo, her mother’s unmade face—appalling to the point of unbearable, had even observed aloud earlier that morning she looked like she was still wearing pajamas. I’ll be goddamned if I’m getting made up and dressed up to sit in a car for eight hours, her mother volleyed back.

Now the sedan eased back up onto another, smaller highway that would lead them to the family farm on the other side of town. It was less rural than the big highway, and divided by a wide grass median. The occasional business was aimed at the local population of farmers and ranchers, unlike the fast-food joints and shopping centers in town. Here was an agricultural supply warehouse with gleaming heavy equipment parked in rows out front. A few miles farther down the road, an ancient diner with a beleaguered sign you could barely read; the parking lot was full. Just beyond that, a windowless bar with darkened neon signage, and then a small, converted roadside house with a fortune teller, said the sign out front, of all things. This last curiosity insinuated itself so deeply inside Caroline’s head, she failed to recognize the approaching turnoff, a short, paved road that ended in gravel, and led thence to the driveway that belonged to her grandparents’ farmhouse.

The two paddocks on the right appeared empty, but Caroline knew the horses were around somewhere; they were one among a small pile of attractions that kept her from losing her mind on these trips. Another was the peach cobbler that would almost certainly be warm from the oven, and her grandmother’s veiny, buttery hands that would be twisted into her cotton pinafore-style apron before they grasped Caroline’s chin. Her grandmother would stare deeply into her eyes and then pull her into an impossibly tight squeeze. I swear I cain’t get over how much you’ve grown, she’d say. Law, just look at you! She would smell of flour and okra and cooking oil and vinegar and cucumber and cracked black pepper and all the most comforting things about this place. Her yappy little dog—Saucy—would vie for attention and Caroline would oblige, even though strictly speaking she did not regard Saucy as a real dog.

Stepping out of the car, she breathed in the muggy air that was somehow different from the air at home, even though the heat and humidity were identical. Maybe it was the elevation, she reasoned. Her father was already ahead of the rest of them, moving stiffly, and then shaking hands with his own dad, before pulling him into an embrace. She knew she ought to stay behind to help her mother manage her sister and the bags, but instead announced she had to pee and sprinted up the porch steps and through the screen door, allowing it to bang closed behind her.

Outside, Caroline’s mother emerged from the passenger side of the car and then pulled the groggy younger child from the back seat and slung her onto her hip; the child poked a thumb into her mouth and looked sleepily around her, clearly disoriented. Caroline’s mother wore family obligations on her person in full view of everyone, a habit young Caroline was already making her own. Like her childhood innocence, the beauty of these people and this magical place would soon be lost on her, until a moment in her life it would be too late to reclaim them.