At sixteen, I was getting some definite opinions about historic Harpers Ferry. As a town to grow up in, it had ripped me off. The closest thing I had to a neighbor was a seasonal park ranger three houses up. “Society”—that group that was supposed to shape me—was several hundred thousand tourists a year who, in coming and leaving each day, might as well not have come at all.

My high school counselor said I had self-esteem issues. Jeez, I wonder why? I lived in a house overrun by tourists, my mother had never remarried and had been working at the same place forever, and my only friend was Chris Lucas, who nobody wanted as a friend. My sophomore year, I failed Spanish, quit the art club, and especially quit church. To my mother's horror, it was now summer, and I was getting high with the town blacks. I put a dent in her car, which put me back in her house. Around all day, I was a monster. If I wasn't punching holes in the wallboard of my room, I was writing “fuck you” on my palms.

Mom's latest effort at being my father-figure was to insist I go see Bobby Hardy about a summer job. Instead, I ended up at Aletha Wilt's. Aletha Wilt owned the Stonewall Inn, a run-down restaurant at the end of Potomac Street. Aletha and her kind were “pro-development,” as Mom put it. They wanted more shops and restaurants, and to heck with those who wanted the working-class community to stay.

“Mister Connors,” Aletha said, lifting her eyes from behind the register as I stepped in, “how's the last private residence in town?”

That was for my mother to hear. She had the last private residence in town, which had come to stand amid all the restored park buildings and souvenir shops as the flagpole of her little war. On Aletha's side was every merchant in town, the National Park Service, and too many tourists to count. On my mother's was herself. There were others who shared her view, but they never stepped forward.

I had come to ask Aletha for a job. So I did. She didn't care that this was my first job. She didn't even ask me if I was planning to sabotage her restaurant for my mother's sake. All she wanted to know was whether I would work under-the-table for four dollars an hour.

That evening, my mother was in a tizzy.

“Josh,” she finally said, sitting down and looking squarely at me, “just tell me why.”

I was sixteen. I didn't know why.

“But Aletha Wilt?” she kept saying.

Mom could never admit she was jealous of Aletha. She and her passel of kids were a mountain family if ever there was one, but they fit into town better than we ever did—and we went back into the town's history for five generations. It all came down to Aletha's flamboyant personality. She paraded around in a colonial-era dress, and the tourists just loved her, never knowing she and her kind were a bunch of hicks underneath. She ran her mouth, calling for this or that, and the park rangers bought into all her talk, as did the shopkeepers. They even voted her head of the merchants' association.

As for me, by daring to go to work for that woman, I had gone far beyond being just a troubled teenager—I was a traitor to everything my mother stood for as town clerk for the last twenty-five years.

I started at the Stonewall Inn the next day: cutting my finger on the slicer, getting my jeans soaked at the pot sink, and generally feeling let down by life for being here. The kitchen, being near the river, was damp and muggy. Grease was everywhere.

The first day, I saw Peg Wilt. Mom always said two things about Peg Wilt—first, she was a true Harpers Ferry native, one of the few left, and second, she had met with bad luck when she married into Aletha's mountain family. Peg barely noticed that I was new, reminded me in an unfriendly voice which burger was to be well done, then left.

Sometime later, her husband Billy came back into the kitchen. He was a welder by trade, but never had any jobs, and spent most of the day hanging around his mother's restaurant, taking advantage of free meals.

“Cheeseburger,” he said, jamming his ticket under the wheel.

It was all over his face. How could a boy fix food for a man? Only a woman fixed food for a man. When I gave him extra fries, thinking he would appreciate it, he slid them off the plate and onto the counter for me to clean up.

*****

That evening, I brought Peg up to my mother, knowing that mentioning her would take her mind off the fact that I had dared to go to work for that family.

“Oh, how's she look?”

“Fat.”

“Josh.”

“Sad.”

This was my dance with Mom—mention sad things, sad people, make the world seem sad around her, so that she would see me as the last hope.

She gave me a concerned look. “My lands, why?”

“Billy.”

She put her magazine down. “You know that for sure?”

I nodded. Everybody knew that Billy Wilt was a bastard.

“That poor girl.” She looked back down at her magazine. “You don't remember her, do you?”

Peg, she said, had lived up on Church Street back when Church Street still had single-family lots. Her mother was Virginia Taylor.

“Virginia and I were in the hospital at the same time. Peg and Stevie,” she said with a sad smile, “were born the same day.”

I sat up. “The same day? She was born the same day as Stevie?”

Stevie, my older brother by ten years, died when he was fifteen. He fell off Chimney Rock and lay in the ravine most of the day before a man found him. Some people said he died from the fall. Others said it was because he lay there for so long. Mom said it didn't really matter which.

She went on to tell me that Peg and Stevie went to grade school together, took roller-skating lessons together, and were confirmed together.

“You don't remember, but your brother used to look out those very blinds at her. I could see it in his eyes. She was the prettiest thing.”

Then, when poor Virginia died unexpectedly, Peg was raised through high school by her aunt. Something must have gone terribly wrong during those years, Mom said, for her to end up marrying a Wilt.

“You think she misses him?” I asked.

“Peg? Your brother? Well, no, why would she? It's been eleven years, Josh.”

I sat looking off. “No reason.”

*****

The next day, I found myself watching Peg. Back and forth through the swinging kitchen doors she went, taking orders out, bringing dirty dishes back, then stopping to write on her pad. If she spoke to me at all, it was to remind me which burger got extra fries.

Then I saw her with her two little kids, and everything about her changed. Instantly she was full of life. As she wiped their faces, straightened their clothes, and stooped to tell them to stay out of the way, there were moments I wished I were one of them.

Halfway through the following day, she paused by the door and, in a voice that sneaked up on me, asked me how my mother was. I looked across the grill at her. She said she had always admired my mother for not selling her house. That, she said, took courage.

She came forward and clipped an order to the wheel and stood inches away, writing on her pad.

“You look like your brother, you know,” she said, taking her eyes off her pad.

She still thought of him sometimes, she said. He was always a leader. In school everyone admired him. He was like some great decathlete in the making. He was the first white boy who could dunk a basketball and run a mile in under four-and-a-half minutes.

I had never been this close to her before. Her blonde hair didn't look so fake, her eyelashes not so glued on, and her face not so fat. When I told her that sometimes I climbed to the top of Chimney Rock by myself, too, she turned and gave me a stare.

“The side trail,” I said. “Not the face.”

Stevie died on the face. The side trail was safe.

“All the way up?” she asked.

“All the way.”

When she returned a few minutes later with another order, I told her something funny my mother had said about Stevie. Then something else. Finally she laughed and said, “Why do you keep talking about him?”

“To see you smile.”

Her face went blank. “Oh my God!”

“So?” I said, coming forward.

She walked off, shaking her head, but with the trace of a smile. I stood watching the door. Finally she reappeared. She made a point of not looking at me at first, but of standing and pretending to write something on her pad.

“Your mother doesn't mind you working here?”

“She thinks you're pretty.”

“Josh, stop.”

Just then, her two kids came crashing through the doors. She caught them and turned them to face me.

“Billy Junior, Tara Ann, this is Josh.”

The girl I pitied immediately, because she had Aletha's wide mouth. The boy looked like his father, which was a reason to pity him, too. As Peg stooped and straightened the little girl's shirt, she put her face beside her children's and looked up at me.

“Still so pretty?”

“Yes.”

She stood up and sent her kids on their way. “Your brother was a big flirt, too.” Then her expression changed. “You should stay off Chimney Rock,” she said, turning and leaving.

*****

The kitchen needed a cleanup. The health inspector was sniffing around. So that afternoon, Peg and I made a point of working together. We lifted stacks of trays together, straightened up the walk-in together, stooped and wiped the underside of tables together. Our hands touched a few times. Once, we even bumped heads. I ended up using her rag, she mine. As she turned the dirty rag in small circles, her hips shook so close to mine I could feel her body touching. She talked about Stevie. Everyone thought they were twins, because of how well they got along.

“And you two were born the same day,” I said.

“My God,” she said, “that's right. I almost forgot.” She stared off into space for a moment. “I remember the day it happened. There were fire engines all along the road. Mom kept saying a boy had fallen. That's all she would tell me. ‘A boy had fallen,'” She went back to the cleaning the table, then stopped and looked over. “Do you really go up on Chimney Rock by yourself?”

I nodded.

“No wonder I like you,” she said, shaking her head.

“Do you…still like him?”

She looked down at her rag. “Billy was charming enough when we met.”

“You should leave him.”

She let her rag drop on the table, turned around, and crossed her arms. I held my expression. Yes, she was unhappy, she said. Yes, she had married too young. Just a girl out of high school. But Billy was nicer then. He had a steady job. But when they moved up onto the mountain and he went into business for himself, it all went downhill. Now all he did was drink—drink and complain.

“Then he gets angry.” She looked off. “Boy, does he get angry.”

“Does he hit you?”

I took her silence as yes.

When she turned around, I leaned into her to kiss her. But she pulled away and took a few steps back, her face drawn up.

“God, Peg,” I heard her say, “the trouble you bring yourself.”

I stepped closer.

“My mother said you can stay with us.”

She stood glaring at me. “You told her? When did you tell her?”

I said she figured it out on her own.

“And she said I could come live with you-all?” She put her hands on her hips. “Just like that?”

I nodded again and didn't flinch.

Hearing footsteps at the back door, we had a second to separate before Aletha came in. I was bent over, pretending to mop the floor. And Peg was a few steps away, pretending to wipe off the counter. In her bossy voice, Aletha said she needed more buffet plates, and Peg told her to check the dishracks. I kept working until she left. When I looked up, Peg was looking at me. She shook her head and bit her lip a little.

“This has gotten out of hand,” she said.

I stood up and let my mop drop. “Why?”

She went over to the back door and slid the bolt into place. Then she took me by the hand and led me up the crooked stairs of the old house that the restaurant was in, to a sofa in a room with a curtain over the doorway, where she sat me down.

“What? Right here?” I said.

“You wanted it,” she said, reaching down for my belt buckle.

I jumped off the sofa. “Not like this!”

“Oh, not like this?” she said, laughing.

She sat, and I stood. We looked around the dusty old room, each waiting for the other to say something.

“If only I were your age again,” she said. Then she gave me a long look up and down. “What have you got against Billy anyway?”

“Nothing.”

She looked away. “And you wanna be my hero? Just like that?”

I had never seen a woman so sad. I knew what I was getting into, I said.

“Oh, no, you don't,” she said back.

We sat there for a moment, wondering about the next step. Finally she said, “Did your mother really say I could live with you-all?”

It was the question I had been waiting for. “In the last private residence in town,” I thought I was cute in saying back.

Later that evening, it seemed an ideal moment to tell Mom what Peg had said about admiring her. She looked up from her plate.

“You two are becoming friends?”

I nodded as innocently as I could, but her eyes lingered on me.

“Mom, she wants to leave Billy.”

She started standing up from the table.

“Oh, dear God, don't get involved!”

I stood, too. I told her that Billy drank, that he beat her, that he was terrible to the kids—all of which was true, I was sure. She looked back with the most horrified face.

“What kind of woman would tell a boy this? I think I sorely misjudged her.” She looked at me closely. “You're already involved, aren't you?”

“He's cheating on her, Mom!”

She put her hand over her mouth. “My lands, she told you that?”

I didn't nod, so I wasn't lying.

“Mom, she has no one.”

“Josh, you know what you're asking me? I can't bring her into this house.”

“Mom, Peg looks up to you.”

“Oh, Josh, how could she? She doesn't even know me.”

“You always said you wanted the old town back.”

“By standing up against the Wilts? I just don't understand all this,” she muttered, turning and leaving the room.

I stayed where I was. She could go figure it out for herself.

*****

By my third week at the restaurant, everyone thought Peg was fooling around. They looked for this mystery man. There were so many older men to suspect—the guy who brought the bread, the guy who brought the milk, the guy who brought the soda. There was even Billy's older brother.

Sometimes, Peg and Billy were in the kitchen at the same time, and I listened to them talk. He mumbled something, and she gave him an indignant look. His voice had no kindness in it, and neither did hers. They were two people entirely sick of each other.

The following weekend, I called her house from the train station. The background was noisy with kids. She could meet me, she said. Later that evening, she pulled into the train station lot in Billy's truck. She saw the worry on my face.

“Change your mind?” she said through the window.

Everybody in town knew this truck: bright red, with big black racks on the back. I climbed up and sat in the middle of the seat, and under the cover of darkness, we rode around town. She commented on how funny I looked, sitting in the middle beside her. At the top of the long hill in town, I took hold of the gearshift and shifted for her.

“No one will believe we're just friends,” she laughed. “He thinks I'm fooling around. It would serve him right.”

When we turned onto Union Street, she looked over.

“I don't suppose your mother said I could bring my kids along? 'Cause I can't leave them.”

We rode past Chief Hayes sitting in his patrol car outside the 7-Eleven. We rode past Mayor Brawley's big, lit-up house. We rode past the cemetery where Stevie was buried.

“Ever wonder why we're friends?” I said.

She glanced over in the dark. We knew the reasons. Mom. The fact that Peg and I were born in the town. Stevie.

“We both could be happier,” she said, turning onto Canton Street.

That's another, I thought.

As we rode back down the long hill and parked along the riverbank, there was in our silence perhaps the biggest reason of all. She leaned forward and looked through the windshield. In the darkness, we couldn't see Chimney Rock across the river. We couldn't see anything but darkness.

“Now you want me to climb up there with you?” she said, her breath fogging the glass.

She reached over and touched my hand. And there, sitting in Billy Wilt's smelly truck, my feet on his empty beer cans, the smell of his pipe smoke still in the air, his tools rattling around under my feet like his bones, I heard the voice of every sensible person I had ever known, every good teacher, telling me not to go forward. But I knew I wouldn't listen.