—MAEVE MAHONEY TO KARA LARSON Exhausted, full, and sated, the band found their usual seats and dozed off as the bus headed toward Nashville. Isabelle moaned. “I should not have had that last piece of pumpkin pie.” Jimmy moved to the backseat and watched his childhood home fade from view. He ran his finger along the edge of his new song. His love song. Although he’d been back to Palmetto Pointe a couple times since Jack and Kara started dating, the last time he’d seen his childhood home fade from view, he’d been in a wood-paneled station wagon with his sobbing mother driving away from a drunken man, a U-Haul trailing wobbly and unsure behind the car. The memory made him turn away from the window. It really didn’t matter what things looked like now; he only saw what was then, back then. Jimmy is the older brother, and he’d always felt like he should have been able to protect Jack and his mama from their drunken dad. Jimmy doesn’t even like to use the word “dad,”
