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Product Description
Retreating from divorce, geologist Jimmy Steverson buys a tiny mill house on Dillehay Pond. His real-estate agent is disgusted, his father observes that he's reliving summer camp, and his friends think of the place as a weekend fishing cabin. Jimmy likes walking out his back door to his own dock where his bass boat waits, but out his front door lies Randleman Road. The nine houses left isolated on the block after the construction of the super-highway are the remnants of a nineteenth-century Carolina mill village, and the people living in them are remnants, too. An arrest leaves one house vacant, and its unlikely new owner is Karen, a college professor whose life centers on a child with special needs. Karen rebuilds her house and her life, and she anchors Jimmy to the block. But the world Jimmy's moved into has its own rules, its own language. Across the pond, Totch runs a barbecue place, which is legally a gift shop because Totch can't get a license to run a restaurant; buying an old postcard translates to ordering a beer. Next door lives Mayme Boulineaux, who has no health department permit to sell her popular breakfast breads, known locally and phonetically as "bolenoes," so they're sold in shoeboxes for cash that never enters a cash register. Vivia Wardlaw makes a living at her sewing machine, sending little girls off to beauty pageants in opulent dresses, while she herself is scared to leave her house. Cone Duffy spent his life in the mill and now is buy dying, nursed by his wife Fairy Etta, both as much in love as when they were youths. The web of neighbor-helping-neighbor is a comfortable net to be caught in, and lax law enforcement is a lure to a young man with marijuana in his kitchen cabinet. Asked to break a rule he can't break, Jimmy forces himself to leave the false security of Randleman Road, and once again become a refugee.
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