Finally, the logs caught, too. She could feel fingers of warmth creeping into the chill, stale air. She sat back on the sofa, watched and waited. Waited for what, she asked herself? Some catharsis? A cleansing? A healing? Coming here had been a mistake. She stood, stripped off the flannel shirt, and tossed it onto the flames, which claimed it with a whoosh of orange and red flames.

She let herself out the window, closed it, and drove off without a backward glance.

*   *   *

Three years later, Annajane forced herself to study her ex-husband, standing there on the altar, waiting for his new bride. Marrying Mason off to Celia was the final step in her self-prescribed cure. It was the only solution. And once it was done, once she heard Father Jolly pronounce the happy couple Mr. and Mrs. Mason Sheppard Bayless, Annajane could move on with her own life. Away from Passcoe, the Bayless family, and, yes, even dear old Quixie, the Quicker Quencher.

*   *   *

Everybody in town said that if you were born in Passcoe, North Carolina, the home of Quixie and the Quixie Beverage Company since 1922, you were born with the cherry-flavored cola running through your blood. It wasn’t quite true of Annajane Hudgens.

Ruth, her mother, always claimed she couldn’t stand the taste of the stuff, but Annajane knew the truth of the matter was that it was the Bayless family who left a bad taste in Ruth Hudgens’s mouth.

Annajane always secretly wondered if Ruth hated the Baylesses because her daddy, Ruth’s first husband, Bobby Mayes, had been killed by a drunk driver while driving a Quixie truck, when Annajane was barely two years old. Ruth had married Leonard Hudgens a year later, and Leonard quietly adopted the little girl when she was four. Even though Leonard worked at the plant, Ruth wouldn’t allow Quixie in her house, and she certainly wouldn’t allow her only child to drink the stuff. No, it was milk or apple juice or lemonade for Annajane, never Quixie.

Annajane could still remember the first time she tasted Quixie. It was in kindergarten, when she was invited to Pokey Bayless’s fifth birthday party.

Her mama had thrown the pink engraved invitation right into the trash. “Think they’re better than us and everybody else in town,” she’d overheard Ruth tell Leonard. “Probably only asked Annajane because they want to lord it over us.”

“Ruth, for Pete’s sake, the girls go to kindergarten together. They’re friends,” Leonard had protested. “Just ’cuz you can’t stand the parents, that don’t mean those little girls can’t play together.” In the end, Annajane cried and begged, until, finally, Leonard had persuaded Mama to let her go to Pokey’s party.

It was a tea party, and for the event a caterer set up a big round table draped in pink tulle on the front porch at Cherry Hill, the Baylesses’ rambling old Greek Revival estate.

The table was set with a child-sized bone china tea set that had been one of Pokey’s birthday presents, and there were real sterling silver forks and spoons and cloth napkins. Each of the six guests—all girls—was presented with her own silver sequined tiara and a pink feather boa. And at every place setting on the table stood a perfectly chilled chubby little bottle of Quixie soda with a pink and white striped straw sticking out of the neck.

Annajane could still remember that first icy sip. She’d never tasted a carbonated beverage before, and the bubbles tickled her nose and gave her the hiccups.

To her, Quixie didn’t taste like cherry Kool-Aid or cherry Life Savers, or even cherry Popsicles. The fruit flavoring was bold and spicy and tart and sweet all at the same time, like a sour cherry exploding on her tongue with sparkly after-notes, and Annajane had never tasted anything as delicious in her entire life.

Besides the bottles of Quixie, the party refreshments included trays of tiny little crustless tea sandwiches and cookies and petit fours and a three-tiered Care Bears birthday cake that Mrs. Bayless had ordered from a bakery in Pinehurst, but for Annajane, nothing could match that first taste of Quixie.

Pokey’s daddy, who’d played butler and head waiter at the party, had been delighted at Annajane’s enthusiasm for the family product, and he had gladly replaced that first empty soda bottle with two more bottles in quick succession.

When the party was over, each girl in attendance was given a huge goodie bag containing a full-sized Cabbage Patch doll, a monogrammed grosgrain ribbon hair bow, and yet another bottle of Quixie cola, this one with a special commemorative label that said: IN CELEBRATION OF POKEY BAYLESS’S FIFTH BIRTHDAY. A VERY SPECIAL DAY.

Even at five, Annajane knew better than to share all the details of the party menu with her mama. She hid the commemorative bottle of Quixie at the bottom of her toy box, and two hours after she got home from the party, still wearing her treasured silver tiara and feather boa, she found herself crouched over the commode, silently retching up the contraband soft drink.

But the upset stomach did nothing to dim Annajane’s enthusiasm for Quixie, or for her new best friend, Pokey, who’d earned the nickname because she’d been born nearly two weeks after Sallie’s due date.

Pokey was as blond and fair-skinned and round as Annajane was dark and skinny. To Ruth Hudgens’s consternation, the girls became inseparable, alternating sleepovers at each other’s house nearly every weekend. Ruth never said a word to Annajane against Pokey—how could she? Silly, sunny-natured, fair-haired Pokey was the golden child everybody—even Ruth, against her will, loved.

As for Sallie Bayless, she was always cordial to Pokey’s best friend, but as Annajane grew older, she came to realize that she would never measure up to Sallie’s standards. Not as a friend, and certainly never as a daughter-in-law.

At the Bayless house, Pokey’s brother Davis was an annoying constant in the girl’s lives, bossing, teasing, and tormenting the girls until they would retreat, in tears, to Annajane’s house, out of his reach. Annajane heard a lot about Mason, the adored oldest brother, who was four years older than Pokey, but she saw him rarely. Mason went to boarding school in Virginia and spent summer vacations sailing and water-skiing at Camp Seagull on the coast. According to Pokey, Mason was very near to a saint. He was the hero who stood up for her against Davis, whipped everybody at every sport, and, during summer vacations, when the family spent a month at their house at Wrightsville Beach, took her fishing and taught her to play spades.

On the handful of occasions when she’d been around Mason as a kid, Annajane had been so tongue-tied in his presence that she was sure they’d never even exchanged more than a “hey-howyadoin?”

Every summer, the Baylesses would invite Annajane to join them for their August trip to the beach, and every summer, Ruth would refuse to let her go. Sallie Bayless would write Ruth Hudgens a polite note on her pale blue engraved stationery, and when that didn’t work, Pokey’s father, Mr. Glenn Bayless, would seek out Annajane’s stepfather, Leonard, at the plant, clap him on the back, and declare loudly, “Now, Leonard, my daughter Pokey is fussin’ and fumin’ at me because y’all won’t let your little Annajane come to the beach with us. It’d sure give me some rest if you could do without her for a week or so.”

But Leonard had his orders. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bayless,” he’d say firmly. “But August is when we get together up in the mountains with Annajane’s grandma and aunts and uncles. I’d have the whole family down on my neck if I messed with the family reunion.”

So every summer, Annajane obediently joined her mother’s relatives in a crowded, damp mountain cabin on a dirt road, where the relatives played cards and listened to gospel music and the cousins slept on pallets on the porch, played endless games of Clue, and griped about the lack of television.