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There was no evidence of hu in any obvious way The one vehicle parked in front of the courthouse, a blue station wagon, had four flats and a bu "ONE DAY AT A TIME" I suspected it had been there in 1972, the year I finished high school, when I last climbed on a Greyhound and turned my back on Grace There wasn’t a soul on the street today and I thought of those movies in which a town is wiped clean of its inhabitants, for one reason or another-a nuclear holocaust, say, or a deadly oods The point, I think, is to et carried aith all our trappings, but this wasn’t the place to shoot a movie like that Grace hadn’t yet entered the era of parking s mortared into the block wall of the courthouse where a person could tie a horse

I tried to i silly, his tall, stiff spine bouncing up and down against his will I erased the fantasy froinary revenge on my father

There wasn’t much to Grace’s commercial district Theof the Hollywood Dress Shop leered fro a ferocious display of polyester The headless mannequins were dressed to the nines, with silver vinyl loafers and red nail polish If I moved a little I could put my reflection there in the ith them: me in my Levi’s and Billy Idol haircut (I was the one with a head) A friend of an in yptian s in the Iditarod She sold those things for good money

The Hollywood Shop was flanked by Jonny’s Breakfast (open all day) and the s ran the railroad tracks On the other side of Jonny’s were the State Line Bar and the Baptist Grocery I tried to place myself inside these stores; I knew I’d been there Directing Hallie through the grocery aisles on a Saturday, ticking off ite in Jonny’s afterward, hunched in a booth drinking forbidden Cokes, reverently eying the distant easy grace of the girls who had friends and s didn’t seeht remember from a book I’d read more than once

I had lied on the bus I’d told the wo next to me that I was a Canadian tourist and had never been to Grace Sometimes I used to do that, tell tales on buses and airplanes-it passes the ti if you throw in enough detail Once I spent a transatlantic flight telling a somber, attentive man about a medical procedure I’d helped develop in Paris, in which human cadavers could be injected with horans for transplant I would be accepting a prestigious medical prize, the name of which I devised on the spot The man seemed so impressed He looked like my father

I didn’t do it anymore, I waswas the truest kind of lie, I guess, containing fear at its heart: I was a stranger to Grace I’d stayed away fourteen years and in ed: I would step off the bus and land s Ticker tape, apologies, the luxury of forgiveness, home at last Grace would turn out to be the yardstick I’d been using to measure all other places, like the mysterious worn out photo that storybook orphans carry fro till the end that it’s really their hoe I didn’t speak And E I hefted up innings I dreaded having to see all the people ere going to say, "How long are you home for, honey?" Possibly they would know I’d come for the school year We would all carry on as if this were the issue: the job Not Doc Ho his patients by the naotten y teacher who’d recentlyI had practically no teaching qualifications, I should add, and things like that get around It’s tough to break yourself as news to a town that already knows you Grace formed its opinions of Hallie and me before we had perht in seventh grade, and our unfortunate given names; our father actually na of the sea," however reasonable a thing that ht be to do in a desert Andto the effect of "order in the cosiven my employment history I must have sensed the lack of cos for approval, I’d shortened it to Codi in the third grade, when Buffalo Bill and the Pony Express held favor with my would-be crowd