The Accidental Bestseller by Wendy Wax

toward the one place that Calvin didn’t like and couldn’t touch: the home in the North Carolina mountains that her grandparents had left her.
    No blond-haired real estate agents would be prancing up her front walk there. In that neck of the woods a person didn’t traipse onto another person’s land without expecting to meet up with the business end of a shotgun. She regretted how civilized they’d become; granny’s shotgun would have come in handy when Laura Wiles had come to call.
    Kendall barely checked her speed as she merged onto Highway 85 at Spaghetti Junction and expertly changed lanes to avoid the slowpokes in the right-hand lanes. About an hour and a quarter into her drive she spotted the swell of foothills that heralded the beginning of the Blue Ridge chain. She passed the scenic overlook at Tallulah Gorge, where a member of the tightrope-walking Flying Wallendas had performed headstands as he crossed the gorge on wire, then continued along the two-lane highway toward Clayton, Georgia, where uncomfortable signs of progress reared their heads: a big boxy Walmart stood next to a shiny new Home Depot, their tar-topped parking lots rectangular slashes in the red clay landscape. The red dust of construction hung in the air and settled on the hood of her car.
    At the new twenty-four-hour grocery store, she stopped and bought a haphazard mix of junk food and staples along with a case of assorted wines.
    She was through the tiny towns of Mountain City and Dillard in a matter of minutes and then began to wind her way upward, the air cooling as she climbed. Kendall lowered the windows to allow the crisp mountain air to caress her cheeks and rifle her hair. Curtains of kudzu shrouded the landscape, looking much too vibrant for a vine bent on suffocation. To the right, the mountainside fell away in a dizzying drop, leaving vistas of air and sky and tree-topped mountains.
    She breathed deeply, savoring the mixture of altitude-cooled air and sun-warmed earth as she passed over the seamless border between Georgia and North Carolina. Mountain laurel, rhododendrons, and fat blue hydrangeas spilled over stone walls and split-rail fences. It was hard to ignore the signs of new construction, but she did her best, focusing instead on the spill of water down a distant rock face, the sun-bleached clapboard of antique stores, and the home-hammered shelving and hand-lettered signs of on-your-honor vegetable stands. Around the next bend a lone horse grazed in an expanse of meadow. From somewhere beyond a cow lowed.
    The old and the new did not always coexist happily or seamlessly here, but for Kendall there was still enough of the long-known to make the drive one of homecoming. And when she turned onto the unpaved road that continued to wind upward to her grandparents’ homestead, each tree and shrub seemed planted in order to point her way there.
    The house itself was old and worn. It sat in the clearing, its last coat of gray paint long since faded. Two brick chimneys, one at each end of the house, poked up from its oft-patched roof. Two basement-level bedrooms and a bath crouched underneath, their large corner windows maximizing both light and view. Porches and decks shot off the one-story structure providing views, if not architectural symmetry, in almost every direction.
    Up here there was no garbage pickup, no mail or newspaper delivery, and no local cable service. Kendall had whiled away her summers here, tending the flower and vegetable gardens with her grandmother, taking long rambling hikes with her grandfather, sitting wordless on one of many wood rockers with a book in her lap, her gaze lifting every so often to follow a hawk riding an updraft or to locate a distant peak of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
    She was twenty-five when her grandparents died and left her the house along with the money to maintain it. She tried to share the house with her new husband, but Calvin never warmed to its rustic charm or understood the hold