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I didn’t have Jackie’s drive, or Randi’s artistic skills. I thought of myself as the glue. Whatever they wanted to do, I did. Whatever hobby they had, I took up. I’d been raised at an early age to go along, so going along was what I did best.

But I meant it. I loved them. I’d grown up in the dark, then I’d come to the mountains of New Hampshire and found the light. Randi and Jackie laughed. They asked my opinions, they complimented my efforts, they smiled when I walked into a room.

I didn’t care what we did. I just wanted to do it with them.

Of course, small town kids inevitably have big city dreams. Jackie started the countdown our junior year in high school. She was sick of nosy neighbors, community theater, and a post office that doubled as the biggest gossip center in town. She had her sights on Boston College, gonna hit the big city and live the glamorous life.

Randi, in her quiet way, upstaged Jackie. One snowy weekend in January, she met a Brown University med student on the ski slopes. We graduated high school in June, and she was married July 1, packing her childhood into four cardboard boxes and heading for Providence, content to spend the rest of her life as a doctor’s wife.

Jackie got her scholarship. She was gone by September, and for the first time in ten years I didn’t know what to do with myself. I stripped, sanded, and refinished Aunt Nancy’s hardwood floors. Steam cleaned all the drapes. Shampooed all the furniture. Started organizing the bookshelves.

End of September, Aunt Nancy took me by the hand.

“Go,” she said, firmly, gently. “Spread your wings, and then, when you’re ready, come home to me.”

I ended up in Arvada, Colorado. Followed some guy I never should’ve followed. Did some things it’s best that Aunt Nancy never knows about. I learned the hard way, you can’t always just go along. Sooner or later, you have to find yourself, even without your beloved aunt and two best friends to help show the way.

After the breakup, determined not to slink home with my tail between my legs, I applied for a job as a 911 operator. Biggest attraction of the job: You didn’t need a college degree, just a high-school diploma, fast typing fingers, and an innate ability to think on your feet. Given those were about the only skills I possessed, I decided to give it a whirl. For thirty thousand dollars a year, I worked long hours, surrendered any hope of having a personal life, and actually discovered a calling.

I worked at a command center with twenty-two phone lines, four radios, and nearly two hundred thousand calls a year. Requests for police, fire, emergency services, animal control—it all came to us. We transferred the calls for emergency services and fire to a second dispatch service, but animal control, police, the prank calls, the incoherent calls, the genuinely panicked and hysterical calls were all ours.

I once worked a shift where my fellow dispatch officer saved a woman’s life by having her scream until the home invaders panicked and ran away. Another shift, my colleague got a terribly injured teenage girl to describe the car that ran her down. The girl died before the police got there, but her statement was recorded on our call lines and became the evidence that put the drunk driver away. I cried with people. I screamed with people. Once, I sang lullabies to a five-year-old boy while his parents shattered glass and hurled insults just outside the closet door.

I don’t know what happened to the boy. I think about him sometimes, though. More than I should.

Which is why after six years, I left Arvada and returned to the mountains. I guess I’d lost some weight. I guess I didn’t look so good.

“Oh, Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant,” my aunt Nancy said quietly when I got off the plane.

She took me in her arms. I stood in the middle of the airport and cried.

My aunt had been right: I’d needed to go away, and now it was good to be back. I embraced the mountains; I welcomed my community, where I was surrounded by