A Dog's Way Home by Bobbie Pyron

our rented house. My heart sagged just like the front screen door. Patches of paint curled away from the wood. The porch was barely big enough for one chair. When we first saw this house, Daddy said the yard was small enough for a feller to pee across. That had made me and Mama laugh.
    Mama sat there beside me looking at the house too. Neither of us said anything for a long moment. Finally she sighed and squeezed my hand. “Let’s go in and unpack some more boxes.”
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    Later that night, after pizza and Daddy’s stories about all the people he was meeting down at the recording studio, I went to my tiny little room to unpack another box. I unpacked the last of my books and sketches. I put Tam’spicture on the table by my bed. I hung his collar from the bedpost.
    Somewhere close by, another siren wailed. I’d never in my entire life heard so many sirens and cars and horns honking and people yelling. I missed hearing the wind in the old oak tree and the hoot owls late at night. I missed hearing Meemaw’s clear, strong voice drifting up through the heat vents from the kitchen below.
    I crawled into my bed and pulled one of Meemaw’s quilts around my legs. From my bedside table, I took out Olivia’s letter. I unfolded it and read it for the fifty-second time.
    Dear Abby,
    You are the best friend I’ve ever had and I’ll miss you very much. But I want you to be with your parents. They need you. My papa used to always say the earth only spins one way: forward.
    Try to be happy, okay?
    Your friend always,
    Olivia
    â€œJust like Olivia,” I said to no one in particular. “Short and sweet.”
    I threw off the quilt and ran to find Mama, which wasn’t hard in such a tiny house.
    â€œMama, have you got your computer set up yet?”
    She looked up from the box of dishes. “Yes, it’s in the living room. Why?”
    â€œMama,” I said, “can you teach me how to do email?”

CHAPTER 22
Tam
    I vy Calhoun had lived outside of Galax, Virginia, near the banks of the New River, ever since most people could remember. Her daddy had built the cabin back in the twenties, when he’d bought the old Sawyer Mill and the forty acres around it. Folks had come from miles around to grind their corn and wheat, taking home sacks full of flour, cornmeal, and grits. Local legend had it that a fair amount of moonshine was bought from the Sawyer Mill too. That wouldn’t have surprised Ivy at all. Her daddy was fond of saying, “A man’s got to do what he has to do to feed his family.” And he had fed them well. There had been Ivy and her big brothers, Samuel and Ben; her older sister, Iris; and the middle child, Rose. Ivy was the baby.
    Ivy shook her head as she pushed herself out of the worn leather chair by the fire. “I’ll be eighty-two come spring, and I still think of myself as ‘the baby,’” she said to no one in particular. She glanced at the faded black-and-white photographs on the fireplace mantel. The mill had been silent for forty years or more now. The great, groaning wheel was still. The cabin, like herself, showed its age. But the river and the mountains and the land were the same as ever.
    Ivy pulled on her boots and grabbed the walking stick her grandson had carved for her at camp. She stuffed a bag of stale bread crumbs in her coat pocket.
    It was her custom when the weather was good to walk the perimeter of the property, just like her daddy had done every day she could remember. It drove her children crazy.
    â€œWhat if you were to fall and break a hip or something?” her daughter would say almost every Sunday during their weekly phone visit.
    â€œYou don’t know what all kind of weirdos might be out there by the river, Mama,” her son would say. He was a police officer in Roanoke. He thought everybody was a weirdo. Between those two and her nosy neighbors, Ivy Calhoun didn’t get a moment’s