Mack’s cell phone rang, and he slipped it out of his hip pocket, laid it on the table, and put it on speaker. “Hello, Mama. What’s going on in San Antonio?”

Adam waved his hands and mouthed, “Don’t tell her I’m here.”

“Charlene is here,” his mother said.

With just those three words, Mack could tell that his mother was upset about something.

“She’s cried until her poor eyes are swollen. Have you seen your brother? If you do, tell him he’d do well to steer clear of me for a while. Cheating on her like that with a secretary that’s twenty years younger than he is. What can he be thinking? Now I’m wondering about those stories he told about his first two wives. I might take a switch to him even if he is a grown man,” Nora Cooper fumed.

“If I see him, I’ll give him your message,” Mack said. “You and Dad should make a trip up here soon. I’ve got five new baby goats, and you know how he loves to watch them play.”

“We’ll do our best to come visit when the weather clears up. His memory gets worse every day, but you’re right, he does love your goats and has a good time when we’re there. I’ve got to get back to the living room and console Charlene. Bless her darlin’ heart. If I’d caught your dad with another woman, I would have shot the both of them. Bye, now.”

“Bye,” Mack said.

“Well, crap!” Adam moaned.

“Maybe it’s time to talk to your wife about that counseling,” Mack suggested.

Adam pushed back the chair and put on his coat. “Don’t gloat.”

“The goat boy never gloats.” Mack followed him to the door and held it open for him to leave.

Chapter Two

Holly sighed in the passenger seat of the car, but Lily ignored it for the fiftieth time. Poor little darlin’s probably felt like they were in solitary confinement with no cell phones or tablets or even their handheld video games to use on the two-hour trip. They both should have thought about the possible consequences before they made the choice to smoke pot or sneak out of the house to drink beer and smoke cigarettes.

“You’ve made your point, Mama. Can we turn around and go home?” Holly asked when they’d left the city and started driving through nothing but ranching country on either side of the road.

“We’re headed in the right direction. Home from now on will be in Comfort,” Lily answered.

“Please, Mama. I won’t ever sneak out of the house again. I promise,” Braden said from the back seat.

“And I’ll never even look at another joint,” Holly promised.

“I know you won’t, because we’ll be in Comfort, and I’ll be keeping a much closer eye on both of you. I’m going to have weekly visits with your school principal.” Lily caught the next exit onto Highway 290. The GPS would have routed her through San Antonio, but the smaller highway kept her out of the big-city traffic.

“I can’t believe we have to go to school in that little-bitty town,” Holly groaned.

“It’s your choice. You can be homeschooled or . . .” Lily paused.

“I’ll go to school,” Holly blurted out.

“Good.” Lily nodded. “If the schedule is still like it was when I was in school, the bus will pick y’all up at seven fifteen every morning.”

“You’ve got to be kidding, right?” Holly spit out. “We can’t ride the bus! That’s for nerds and geeks. You’ll have to take us.”

“Sorry, darlin’. You’ll just have to get out your nerd shirts and your geek jeans.” Lily turned on the radio and found her favorite country station.

“Are we going to have to listen to that the whole way?” Braden whined from the back seat.

“Can’t we just have our Nintendos until we get there?” Holly begged.

Lily shrugged. “They’re packed in a box, and it’s in the moving van.”

“This is too much punishment for just smoking one joint,” Holly fumed.

“You think so?” Lily asked. “Just imagine what would have happened if the police had caught you, especially since you had a little bag of the stuff stashed in the lining of your purse.”

“You went through my purse?” Holly raised her voice.

Lily turned up the volume on the radio. “Yes, darlin’, I did, and we’ll have random checks of your purse and your room until you earn back the trust I’ve given you all these years.”

“God! All over one joint! What if you’d found . . .” Holly stopped and glared at her mother.

“Did I miss something in your purse, sweetheart? Do I need to unpack all your boxes and make sure there’s nothing tucked away with your cute little bikini underbritches?” Lily asked.

“No, Mama,” Holly sighed. “It’s just that pot is such a minor thing. My friends do all kinds of worse things.”

“Then it’s time to get away from those friends. I’m not your friends’ mother. I don’t watch my children ruin their lives. Sit back. Enjoy the ride. And listen to some good old country music,” Lily said.

“No, you ruin our lives for us,” Braden said from the back seat.

Lily ignored both of them. When she had left Comfort to go to college, she’d vowed that she would never live there again. Small-town life wasn’t for her, especially in a historic little town that catered to tourists looking for a trip back in time. She had wanted to go forward with her life, not live forever in the past, with historical markers everywhere. That was twenty years ago. Now the idea of historical markers didn’t seem so bad.

The kids remained silent until she turned south in Fredericksburg. That’s when Holly moaned dramatically. “We’re dropping off the edge of the world.”

“And falling into—”

Lily shot a look into the rearview mirror that stopped Braden’s sentence short, and he blushed. That was a good sign, in her book. At least he wasn’t so hardened that he couldn’t turn red when he was about to say a dirty word.

“We’ll be in the place we’re ‘falling into’ in about thirty minutes, tops. You’ll have the same bedrooms that you always had when your grandparents were still with us. I don’t expect the place to look much different than it did when we came for your grandmother’s funeral five years ago,” she said.