Excerpt - Homesong

It stood, empty and alone, at the intersection of two old dirt roads. Scraggly bushes had grown up over the peeling walls, poking their way inside through broken window panes. The skeletal remains of an old vegetable garden jutted long bony fingers out of the brown scrap of yard by the front door, and the house's shingled sides had been spray-painted with graffiti. But that too had turned brown, as if even the vandals had moved on to greener pastures.

Reed sat silently in his car, biting on his thumb as he looked out at the place where he had grown up. Cicadas, stirred by the heavy heat of the early August morning, whirred their drowsing song in the tall grass by the side of the road. The sun hadn't even crested the far hills yet, and already the inside of his ancient yellow VW felt like an oven, with sweat gathering along his hairline to drip down his neck, sticking his shirt to the small of his back.

It was strange to think that he hadn't laid eyes on the place in almost a year. He had been born in that house, as had generations of Fitzgeralds before him. His grandmother had raised him there: he had crawled along the bare, uneven floorboards, taken his first wobbly steps in the patchy front yard. The old place had never been beautiful. It wasn't some picturesque cottage nestled in the heart of rural Virginia. It was a squat, ugly dwelling that had seen too many deaths and not enough births, but which knew the pain of both.

The original foundation had been laid by a long-ago Fitzgerald ancestor in the hardscrabble years following the Civil War – a tough little house built by a tough little man, who had gone on to found the very town that sprawled not two miles from here. Later, of course, the Fitzgerald family had built themselves a home more suited to their own sense of importance – an elegant country house high on the hill. It had been a gracious building that rode the crest of the hill as pretty as a boat on the water. From the front of its wide wraparound porch, you could look right past this tiny hovel to the town that lay beyond.

The big house had burned down when Reed's grandmother was a child. But money and a kind of careless confidence had resurrected it in the late '60s, just a few years before Reed had been born. A new family – outsiders, as his grandmother always said, her voice thick with anger – had come in from out of town, snapped up the land, and rebuilt the house from the original blueprints.

Kate's family, Reed reminded himself, trying not to notice the way his heart snaked in his chest at the thought of her. He tugged at the handle on the car door and pushed outward with his shoulder, ignoring the painful squeal of rusty hinges as the door swung open. He unfolded himself from the front seat, peeling himself carefully away from the old plastic covers, then stretched his long and lanky frame before leaning backward against the car, crossing his ankles with a casualness that he did not actually feel.

If he had turned his head and looked upward, he would have been able to see that big house – empty now, but still all white and shining with majestic beauty. Instead, he just shoved his hands into his pockets and looked down, contemplating the dirt at his feet. He was on his way out of town. Everything that he owned was packed into two cardboard boxes on the cracked back seat of his car. One box held his clothes, which were secondhand but clean and carefully folded. The other held a dozen books and what Grand had once scornfully called the family legacy – an old photo album covered in crumbling black leather, and lined with stained and threadbare purple silk.

And that was it. That was all that was left of his family. Generations of men and women who had lived and loved, killed and healed, taught and raised children. Some kind and generous, some mean and scheming. But all of them Fitzgeralds, and all of them dead. And with all of that history…there was nothing left but a broken, faded photo album at the bottom of an old cardboard box. By this time next week, even the shack in front of him would be gone.

College. Reed felt a nervous grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. Two years ago, if anyone had asked him whether he would go to college, he would have scowled and spit a "Hell no" out the side of his mouth. In spite of all Kate's enthusiastic dreaming, in spite of her faith in him, the thought of him pursuing a higher education seemed so remote that he had never seriously considered it. He certainly would never have believed that he would end up heading to New York University, with a scholarship letter in his pocket and a dorm room already waiting for him. But anger and desperation can make some potent magic. He had finally gotten his act together and now he was on his way out of this small town to the biggest big-city of them all. The idea of it made his gut clench with excitement and fear, but he clamped down tight on both and tried to set his mind to what he was here for.

He had stopped here on his way out of town, knowing that he had to have a last look, not knowing when or if he would ever come back to this place. He had intended to walk through the place one last time, to say a final goodbye and thank you to his grandmother. But now he felt strangely unwilling to take the first step up the overgrown walkway. As if walking forward would somehow be going back. As if maybe the front door would open and his grandmother would be standing there, instead of lying half a mile down the road in the family graveyard. As if maybe the house would swallow him whole, and he'd be trapped there forever.

He turned to look at the empty fields around him. In his grandmother's youth, all of this land had belonged to his family. The little valley had once been green and alive with corn and tobacco crops. Even after his great-grandfather Gussy had gambled it all away, others had worked the land, given it a purpose and a life. But now that too was gone. The fields had gone to seed, the green grass to dust. In a few days the house would be bulldozed, the land raked and mowed over, and a condominium community, of all things, would be built here.

The thought of it made Reed ache in a place that he could not have named. But in a secret place it also made him glad, because now there was nothing to hold him here. It was as if the cancer that had killed Grand had also poisoned the very soil around them. When she died she took with her all the ties he might have had to these few acres of earth that had once been called Fitzgerald land.

On the tiny front porch he turned and looked out over the land again. He imagined his grandmother standing here, on this same exact spot, year after year watching the world go by. She had been born in 1900, not exactly a time of great opportunity for women. But she had been whipsmart and from a wealthy family – for her, the possibilities could have been endless.

She had moved into the little house when she was twelve, along with her mother and their last remaining servant. After the big house had burned down, taking her father's life with it. After they had discovered they were bankrupt, and the government had seized their land for back taxes. After everything had gone to hell.

With effort, Reed swung his eyes upward, finally bringing his gaze to the house which stood on the hill. It was so beautiful that it hurt his eyes just to look at it. When Kate had lived there it had been like his second home. He had run down its wide hallways, scuffed up its glowing hardwood floors with his young feet. He had played under the high ceilings and sat before roaring fires in its carved fireplaces. But Grand had hated the place, and no wonder. To her it had been an abomination, like the resurrected corpse of a dead child. It stood as a reminder to everything that she had lost, everything that had been taken away from her. The two houses faced each other across a great divide – not just the physical divide of hill and valley, but a divide of fortune, a divide of fate.

The front door was unlocked – it's not like there was anything inside worth stealing – and when Reed put out his hand it swung open with a horror-movie squeal. He gave himself a minute to allow his eyes to adjust to the murky interior. Then he crossed the threshold.