Rocks that Float

Book excerpt: Winner of the 2006 IPPY Award for General Fiction When geologist Jimmy Steverson buys a tiny mill house on Dillehay Pond, his real-estate agent is disgusted, his father says he's reliving summer camp, and his coworkers think it's a weekend fishing cabin. Jimmy likes walking out his back door to his own dock and bass boat, but out his front door lies Randleman Road. The nine houses left on the block are the remnants of a nineteenth-century Carolina mill village, and the people living in them are remnants, too. An arrest leaves one house vacant, and its unlikely new owner is Karen, a college professor. As Karen rebuilds her house and her life, she anchors Jimmy to the block. But the world he's moved into has its own rules, its own language. Across the pond, Totch runs a barbecue place, which is legally a gift shop because he can't get a restaurant license; buying a postcard translates to ordering a beer. Next door to Jimmy lives Mayme Boulineaux, who has no health-department permit to sell her popular breakfast breads, known locally and phonetically as bolenos, so they're sold in shoeboxes for cash that never enters a register. The county sheriff drops by Jimmy's to explain his mission of protecting people--including marijuana-smoking geologists--from the law. Just as Jimmy becomes comfortable in the web of neighbor helping neighbor, he's asked to breach his own personal code. He waits to see what rules Karen lives by.