At ten o’clock, the heat was already rising from the gravel driveway, turning the red Georgia clay into a fine, orange powder. Clara’s blue sedan pulled up near the well house, her tires kicking up a small cloud of dust that settled on the dry hydrangea bushes.
She did not get out of the car immediately. She sat behind the wheel, checking her lipstick in the rearview mirror before she finally pushed the door open. She held her reading glasses in her right hand, tapping them twice against her chin as she looked toward my kitchen window.
“Martha, you look entirely worn out,” Clara said, her voice carrying that precise, formal grammar she had used ever since we were girls. “You should not be spending your mornings dealing with things that are best left in the past.”
“Daniel is here, Clara,” I said, leaning against the warm metal of her car hood. “He is sitting at my kitchen table right now.”
Clara’s eyes narrowed behind her thin frames, her expression hardening. “A man who disappears for fifty-five years does not simply walk back into a small town without an angle. You must be careful.”
“He was kept in a prison camp, Clara,” I said. “He was not hiding.”
