Inside the sports car Tess McPhail interrupted her singing and said aloud, "Move your ass, Miss Elsie!"

For the last five hours she'd been listening to her own voice on a rough cut off the upcoming album she'd been recording in Nashville for the past several weeks. Her producer, Jack Greaves, had handed the tape to her on her way out of the studio yesterday, and said, "Give it a listen on your way up to Missouri, then call me when you get there and let me know what you think."

The tape continued playing as Tess impatiently tapped the leather steering wheel with a long persimmon fingernail.

"Elsie, would you move it!"

Miss Elsie, her sprouty white hair creating a fuzzball silhouette, retained a two-handed death grip on the wheel and continued around the square at the same snail's pace. She finally reached the corner, turned left and got out of Tess's way while Tess squealed around a right, speed-shifted, laid on the gas, and burned her way up Sycamore, muttering, "Lord o' mercy, small towns."

This one hadn't changed since she'd left it eighteen years ago. Same red-brick courthouse in the town square, same tired storefronts around it, same old World War II veterans watching the traffic and waiting for the next parade to give them something to do. Same aging houses along Sycamore. Though the hickories and elms were bigger, most places looked just like when Tess had graduated from high school. There was Mindy Alverson's house: did her parents still live there? And what had happened to Mindy, Tess's best friend back then? That was where Mrs. Mabry used to live. She had taught geometry and could never instill the tiniest flicker of interest in Tess, a girl who had drifted her way through any class that wasn't related to music or creative arts, insisting she wouldn't need it, not when she was going to be a big country western singer after she graduated.