The first thing I noticed was the light.
My bedroom faces west, and on October afternoons the sun comes in low over the Hensleys' tobacco barn across the road and lands on the foot of my bed, and for seven years it had landed on the same thing: a field of white cotton gone the color of weak tea, scattered with blue eight-pointed stars, and between the stars, if you knew how to look, the faint raised lines of a hundred thousand tiny stitches. That afternoon the light landed on a bare mattress pad. It was so white it hurt.
I stood in the doorway with my backpack still on one shoulder and my Dairy Queen visor still in my hand, and for a second I honestly thought I had walked into the wrong room. Then I saw my lamp, and my stack of library books, and the poster of the Red River Gorge that Mom had bought at a gas station the summer before she died, and I understood that it was my room and something was missing from it, and my body understood what before my brain did, because I was already running.
"Carla?"
The house was half boxes. We had been half boxes since Labor Day, when the offer came through on the place in Lexington, a three-bedroom with a two-car garage in a subdivision called Hartland Glen where every house was the color of a different kind of oatmeal. Carla had a spreadsheet for the move. She had a color code: green tape for keep, yellow tape for storage, red tape for the church. There were red-taped boxes in the hallway and red-taped boxes in the dining room and a whole wall of them, I knew, in the garage, because I had been carrying them out there for three weeks while Carla stood with her clipboard saying, "Lift with your knees, Junie, not your back."
"Carla!"
"Garage," she called. "Don't run in the house."
I ran in the house.
The garage door was up, and the afternoon came in flat and gold across the concrete, and Carla was standing in the middle of it with a tape gun in one hand and a black Sharpie behind her ear. She was forty-one that year. She was small and quick and had the kind of short blond haircut that she called low-maintenance and that she got trimmed every four weeks, on the dot, at a salon in Richmond. She worked in medical records at the hospital there, the Baptist