“Yep. ’Bout as far west as you kin git and still be in the state of North Carolina. Well—not quite, but it took us purt’ near ten hours to drive here.”

“My goodness.” She smiled.

Daddy said, “How did you folks git here from Massachusetts?”

“We flew.” She smiled.

Charlotte could see Mr. Amory’s eyes run up and down Daddy…his ruddy face with its reddish brown field hand’s sunburn…the mermaid…the sport shirt out over the gray twill work pants, the old sneakers…

“Whirred you fly in to?” said Daddy.

“An airport five or six miles out of town—Jeff, what’s the name of the field we flew into?”

“Boothwyn.” He smiled at Momma, who wasn’t smiling.

“Well, I’ll be switched,” said Daddy. “I didn’t even know they had an airport here.”

Charlotte could see Beverly Amory running her eyes up and down Momma…down to where the denim jumper descended below the knees and the athletic socks rose up…

“Oh, it’s very small,” said Mrs. Amory. She smiled. “It’s not really an airport, I guess. That’s probably not the right term.” She smiled some more.

The smiles seemed not so much cheery as patient.

“Anything else I can help you folks with?” said the porter, Kim, who had now removed everything from the dolly. The way he had pushed them together, the boxes created a massive little edifice.

“I think that’s just about it,” said Mr. Amory. “Thank you very much, Kim.”

“No problem,” said the young man, who was already heading out the door with the dolly. Without stopping, he said, “You all have a good time.” Then he looked at Beverly and Charlotte. “And a good year.”

“We’ll try,” said Beverly, smiling in a certain way.

She’d practically struck up an acquaintance with him! Charlotte felt even more inadequate. She couldn’t think of anything to say—to anybody, much less to some good-looking senior.

Momma cocked her head and stared at Daddy. Daddy compressed his lips and shrugged his eyebrows. All right—the boy hadn’t stood around waiting for a tip.

A muffled ring, oddly like a harp being strummed. Mr. Amory reached into the pocket of his khakis and withdrew a small cell phone. “Hello?…Oh, come on…” His sunny demeanor was gone. He scowled into the little mouthpiece. “How could that possibly…I know…Look, Larry, I can’t go into all this now. We’re in Beverly’s room with her roommate and her parents. I’ll call you back. In the meantime, ask around, for God’s sake. Boothwyn isn’t so small that they don’t have mechanics.”

He closed up the cell phone and said to his wife, “That was Larry. He says there’s some sort of hydraulic leak in the rudder controls. That’s all we need.”

Silence. Then Mr. Amory smiled again, patiently, and said, “Well…Billy…where are you and…Lizbeth…staying?”

Daddy said, oh, they wouldn’t be staying, they were going to turn around and drive back to Sparta, and Momma and Mrs. Amory had a little discussion about the rigors of such a long round-trip in one day. Mrs. Amory said they would be flying back as soon as they could to get out of Beverly’s hair and let her and Charlotte arrange things for themselves, and besides, wasn’t there a meeting of all the freshmen in this section in a couple of hours? Hadn’t she seen that on the schedule? That was true, said Beverly, but would they mind terribly not getting out of her hair until they had something to eat—hello-oh?—since she, for one, was starving? Both Mr. and Mrs. Amory gave their daughter a cross look, and then Mr. Amory smiled at Momma and Daddy like Patience on a monument smiling at Grief and said that, well, it looked like they were going to go have a quick bite to eat, and if Momma, Daddy, and Charlotte would care to come along, they were welcome. As he remembered, there was a little restaurant in town called Le Chef. “Not fabulous,” he said, “but good; and quick.” Daddy gave Momma an anxious glance, and Charlotte knew what that was about. Any unknown restaurant named Le Chef or Le anything sounded like more money than he was going to want to spend. But Momma gave Daddy a little nod that as much as said that they probably should sit down and have one meal with Charlotte’s roommate’s parents, since they had suggested it.

Daddy said to Mr. Amory, “There’s a Sizzlin’ Skillet just before you git to the campus? Bet it’s not more’n half a mile from here. I ate at a Sizzlin’ Skillet near Fayetteville once”—wunst—“and it was real nice; real good and real quick.”

More silence. All three Amorys looked at each other in a perplexed fashion, and then Mr. Amory turned on the most patient smile yet and said, “All right…let’s by all means go to the Sizzlin’ Skillet.”

Charlotte stared at Mr. and Mrs. Amory. They both had deep suntans and absolutely smooth, buttery skin. Compared to Momma and Daddy, they were so soft—and sleek as beavers.

Daddy excused himself and left the room. A few minutes later he returned with a bemused look on his face. “Strangest darn thing,” he said to the room. “I was looking for the men’s bathroom? And some folks down ’eh, they told me iddn’ any men’s bathroom. Told me this is a coed dorm, and there’s one bathroom, and it’s a coed bathroom. I looked in ’eh, and I seen boys and girls.”

Momma compressed her lips severely.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Mrs. Amory. “Apparently they get used to it very quickly. Isn’t that what Erica said, Beverly? Beverly has a good friend from school, Erica, who was a freshman here last year.”

“Certainly didn’t bother Erica,” said Beverly in an airy, nothing-to-it manner.

“I gather the boys are very considerate,” said Mrs. Amory. Charlotte could tell she was making an effort to calm the country folks’ fears.

Momma and Daddy looked at each other. Momma was doing her best to hold herself back.

The six of them went down to the parking lot, and Daddy pointed out their pickup truck with the camper top and said, “Whyn’t we all go in our pickup? Me’n’ the girls can sit in the back.” He looked optimistically at Beverly. “We got some sleeping bags back ’eh we can sit on.”

“That’s nice of you, Billy,” said Mr. Amory with his patient smile, “but we might as well take ours. We’ve got six seats.” He pointed at a huge white Lincoln Navigator SUV.

“Well, as I live and breathe!” said Momma in spite of herself. “Whirred you folks git that? I don’t mean to pry.”

“We rented it,” said Mr. Amory. Anticipating the next question, he said, “You call ahead, and they’ll bring it right out to the pla—to the airport for you.”

So they drove to the Sizzlin’ Skillet in the Lincoln Navigator. It was all leather inside, with windows as dark as sunglasses and strips of exotic wood, polyurethaned, here and there. Charlotte was glad they hadn’t seen what was under the old pickup’s camper top, or inside the cab, for that matter.

The Sizzlin’ Skillet had quite a sign on its roof: an enormous black skillet, eight or nine feet in diameter, with THE SIZZLIN’ SKILLET written in huge curvy letters on the pan. Around the skillet were rings of red and yellow lights.

From the moment one walked in, an astounding array of hot, slick colors screamed for attention from every direction. Everything was…big…including, straight ahead, up on the wall, some alarmingly detailed color photographs of the house specials: huge plates with slabs of red meat and gigantic patties of ground meat fairly glistening with…ooze…great molten slices of cheese, veritable lava flows of gravy, every manner of hash brown and french-fried potato, fried onion, and fried chicken, including a dish called Sam’s Sweet Chickassee, which seemed to consist of an immense patty of skillet-fried ground chicken beneath a thick mantle of bubbling cream sauce, all of it blown up so large in the photographs that slices of tomato—the only vegetable depicted, other than lettuce and the fried potatoes and onions—created an impression of overwhelming weight.