Road to Somewhere: Greetings from Nowhere by Barbara O'Connor

FOR SALE, she wrote, and felt a jab at her heart.

Sleepy Time Motel. Shawnee Gap, North Carolina.

Another jab.

Ten lovely rooms with mountain view. Swimming pool. Tomato garden.

Jab, jab.

For sale by owners, Harold and Agnes Duncan.

Then she felt a jab that nearly knocked her over. Her hand trembled so much that she could hardly keep the pen on the paper as she scratched out Harold's name.

With her husband of many years dead and bills piling up in the junk drawer, not a customer for three months and no one to talk to but her one-eyed cat Ugly, Aggie has no choice but to sell her small motel just over the ridge from I-40, where tourists fill the shiny new chain motels on their way to the Smokies. But that one little ad changes more than just Aggie Duncan's life.

Fate suddenly brings customers to Aggie's door, three family groups, each with a child and each with a ghost of someone lost in their hearts. First comes Willow and her dad Frank Dover to see about buying the motel. Willow's mother Dorothy has left the family, gone to make a new life in Savannah with her sister, and her dad is ready to try a new life in Shawnee Gap. Willow, however, still grieves the loss of her mother and has just watched her little brick house, her best friend, and the rest of her life's history disappear behind her through the rear window of her dad's truck. She's heard nothing from her mom since she left, not even a postcard, and her dad goes silent when she tries to talk about her loss.

Cheery Loretta and her proud adoptive parents arrive also, seeing in the down-at-the-heels motel a quiet, homey place to stay for their vacation in the mountains. In a small package from a stranger, Loretta has just received a box of trinkets, all that was left behind by her just-deceased birth mother. Inside with a photograph of a little girl who looks like Loretta were a rhinestone poodle pin, an old watch, a folding fan, and a jingly bracelet with souvenir charms--the Statue of Liberty, a cowboy hat, a cactus, and a Smoky Mountain bear. Loretta becomes convinced that the charms represent places her mother had visited, and her good-natured, loving parents have promised to take her on a pilgrimage to every one represented on the bracelet, beginning with the Smokies.

Then there's Kirby, on his way to a last-chance reform school, the Smoky Mountains Boys Academy, with his perpetually angry mother, made even more angry by the breakdown of their rusty old car a couple of miles down the winding two-lane road. Kirby's personal ghost is the good son and brother he's never been, the "fine young man" that Aggie sees in his clumsy efforts to entertain the younger girls with his yo-yo tricks and help her fix up the motel for a promised busload of tourists from Atlanta.

Sadly Aggie begins to pack up her few keepsakes--Harold's sweater, her wedding plate and Harold's mother's teacup--but as painful as the dreaded leave taking is, she is drawn to the three children staying at the Sleepytime Motel. Although Aggie has little she treasures beyond her battle-scarred cat and Harold's old slippers, she's always favored kids, and from her generous heart the three get what they need to make them complete. In turn each manages to give back to Aggie exactly what she has needed as well.

A gently told tale of ordinary people who surprisingly have all they need to make each other whole, Barbara O'Connor's Greetings from Nowhere (Frances Foster Books) gets to that genuine happy ending that does not surprise but deeply satisfies the reader. As Christian Science Monitor's reviewer puts it, "Readers will come to realize that everyone has something worth paying attention to, if you dig deep enough." This one is a remarkable novel, hard to put down, with beautifully drawn and quite unforgettable characters.