Since he had to be machine-side at seven o’clock, Thom had to be out of bed at five. He saw a lot of sunrises, and the fruition of the summer season of central Carolina. The shop sat on a service road along Interstate 40 between Greensboro and Winston-Salem, but Thom’s access was from the back, through the countryside, over rolling farmed Piedmont hills. The forty-five minute commute, door-to-door, passed through a state forest bordered on both sides by land that had been farmed for hundreds of years. The Stokesville Road followed a series of long gentle turns that took the two lanes quietly over low hills and through wide valley floors blanketed with a patchwork of small farms. Across the summer days, pastures became more lush, corn grew thicker and higher, tobacco leaves reached their width and breadth and waved in slow breezes. Thom’s parents lived just outside Mayodan. The house was always unfamiliar when he returned for holidays because it was not the house in which Thom had grown up but rather where his parents relocated after his father’s retirement, wanting to get out of town, into the country. The furniture and the dishes and the photographs on the wall were all very familiar, but not the house. His room was very familiar, arranged in the same way he had always known it, except now the view from the window by the desk was not of the Holt’s backyard but of a small apple orchard on the side of the hill on the other side of a small pasture, its border thick with blackberry bushes. There was such a mixture of the familiar and the new.