In Country

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains incidents of alcohol and substance misuse and references to post-traumatic stress disorder and death by suicide.

The chapter opens in 1984, with Sam Hughes, her uncle Emmett Smith, and her paternal grandmother Mamaw Hughes driving from the small town of Hopewell, Kentucky to Washington, DC to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This chapter is very short and written in the present tense from Sam’s perspective.

Sam, a recent high school graduate, is 17. Her father Dwayne died in the Vietnam War a month before she was born. Emmett is also a Vietnam War veteran. Mamaw, Dwayne's mother, has not traveled out of the state of Kentucky before. The trio travels in Sam's new car, an old Volkswagen with transmission trouble.

The car threatens to break down, but they push on, listening to popular music on the radio. They eventually pull into a Howard Johnson's motel, where the three will share one room because they have very little money. Mamaw is scandalized that she will spend the night in a room with a man. Sam thinks the room is beautiful and clean, with “a secret history of thousands of people, their vibrations and essence soaked into the walls and rug” (12).