Synopsis/Details
Sandra Mills is eighteen, twelve days out from move-in at UT Austin, and has a deferral form sitting filled-out on her laptop that she has not mentioned to a living soul. Her mother is working doubles. Her grandmother is starting to call her by the wrong name. Staying home would feel like love. It is actually fear, and Sandra knows it. Then the air over her street bends, and she lands in 1974. Then 1944. Then, by mistake, 1863. Barnabee — a surveyor who fell through a "thin patch" in 1837 and never found his way out — can send her home. But every jump costs him some of his own substance, and on the big one he overshoots by a century. Stranded through six weeks of a Confederate summer, Sandra works a hardscrabble farm for a widow named Martha Ellicott and teaches Martha's twelve-year-old daughter to read out of a farmer's almanac. And she learns the rule that will define the rest of her life: on the other side, no time is passing. Four seconds. Nobody will ever know she was gone. The road home runs forward through the century in wrenching stops — an oil field in 1901, a bank panic in 1929, and a dust storm in 1935, where Sandra finally understands what Barnabee has been walking this road for, and what he lost on it ninety-one years ago. She settles his debt for him. He spends the last of himself putting her back on her own sidewalk, four seconds after she left it.
