“What’s all this now?” Bear asked, already nervous he’d been left out of something.
“It turns out that our beloved geniuses Tam and Wally are no better cartographers than we are,” Daniel said.
“One single dollar!” Tam shouted, waving something over her head, and they all laughed again.
Daniel was teasing her, it turned out, because she and Wally had been talked into buying some little piece of junk from an antiques store because the owner had been so friendly. I took it from her as they continued to joke, opening it up.
He was right. It was an old road map—a worthless little thing. Faded, tattered, out of date, and something we likely could have found in the glove compartment of any old truck sleeping in a retired couple’s garage.
“It’s more than half a century old,” Daniel guffawed, so loud that Wally almost dropped the tongs by accident.
“That’s the great thing about places like this,” Tam fired back. “Nothing changes, so the map’s probably still completely accurate!”
This earned her much laughter and a toast from all of us. Then something happened to the grill’s fire, and Daniel bent down beside Wally, their faces far too close to the flames, investigating the issue.
“Here, take it, before they burn themselves to death,” I gasped, and tossed the map at Tam so I could pull them both back by their collars. Tam scooted over so Romi, Eve, and Bear could sit down, and they began pouring the wine.
“What about here?” Romi asked, looking at the half-refolded thing. “Where we are now?”
“I bet we can find it,” Tam said.
Wally had given Daniel and me the tongs and gone over to the table, now bored with the grill, and held Tam’s glass for her as she used both hands to lay the paper flat on the table. “What are we doing?” he asked, taking a sip.
“Finding where we are on our map,” Tam smiled. She emphasized the word our, as if the little scrap was actually precious and the rest of us just couldn’t see it, which drew a round of chuckles. Wally grinned, and drank more of her wine. “Okay, what did we drive up? Interstate 17?”
“Yeah, to County Road 206,” I called.
Tam put her finger on the page and traced one of the snaking lines. “Hey, there’s Rockland,” she announced triumphantly, pointing at a tiny white dot. “That’s the last town we all passed before reaching this house,” she said. “Where we got the groceries.”
“Where we got the wine, too,” Romi added.
“So that’s been here for at least sixty years, then,” Wally said, shrugging.
“And this house is just past the town, so we’re what, five miles north?”
“No more than that, for sure,” Eve agreed.
We all watched vaguely in between sips of wine as Tam continued to trace her finger up the 206 past Morton Hill Road, where our new home was nestled into a little grove just before the land fully turned into the wild Catskills.
“Wally,” she said suddenly, and he looked down at the map, to where she was pointing.
Right in between both places, there was another dot along County Road 206.
A little town called Agloe.
“Do you remember another town between this house and Rockland?” she asked him.
“No,” he said, brow furrowed. “Just fields. We would have seen it out the car window if there was.”
“That’s what I thought,” she replied. “Daniel!” she called to him, but he’d been able to hear over the grill, and shook his head.
“We didn’t see anything either,” I added. “Nothing after Rockland. Just a few miles of grass and road, and then the turnoff for this house.”