FORTUNE, OR WHAT'S LEFT OF IT, is only a few miles from my house. Mis-Fortune, people call it around here. Mis-Fortune on the Miss-issippi. That's because it's a ghost town. When you turn onto Front Street, you pass a crooked sign that says:

Welcome to Fortune

Population: [begin strikethrough]128 35[end strikethrough] 12

My older sister, Nora, and all my friends think Fortune is spooky because weeds are sprouting out of the sidewalks, and the windows on the old brick buildings are boarded up. And nobody has ever seen a single one of those twelve lonely people wandering around. Still, I like it there. Sometimes when I ride my bike over to the Short Stop to buy candy, I ride a couple of miles farther, just so I can suck on Jolly Ranchers and smell the big, brown river drifting past and cruise up and down the empty streets thinking about how things must have looked when the town was booming.

Dad says if it weren't for Fortune nobody in the old days would have been able to button up their shirts. Buttons used to be made out of shells, he told me, and the Mississippi happened to be knee-deep in the kind of mussels and clams whose shells were perfect for making the strongest, pearliest buttons. But eventually the shells ran dry and somebody came along and invented plastic buttons and the town of Fortune slowly withered away.

One of my favorite old buildings on Front Street has stone columns and a lion's head carved up near the rooftop, with a name and date etched underneath. McNally and Sons, Established 1901. I figure Mr. McNally and those sons of his must have been button-makers because the alley behind their building is still filled with piles of shells — all of them punched through with perfectly round holes like pieces of Swiss cheese.

It turned into a habit of mine this past year, riding to Fortune on my bike whenever I was worried about things — whether Dad was keeping safe and whether he and Mom would get back together once he came home from Afghanistan. Dad moved out two months before he left for duty. He loaded a duffel bag of clothes and Old Blue, his hunting dog, into the back of his truck and went to live in Uncle Spence's basement. "Don't worry," he kept saying to Nora and me. "It's only temporary. Your mother and I will work things out."

And I believed him at first — so much that I didn't tell anybody that my mom and dad might be getting a divorce. Not Allison or Kelly. I even refused to admit it to myself. As much as I hated my father going off to war, I decided that his year away would be the thing that fixed my parents' marriage. There were little signs everywhere to prove it. The picture of Dad in his uniform that Mom kept on her dresser. The birthday card she sent to him back in December. I peeked inside while she was searching for stamps to mail it. "I love you," she had written. "Be safe."

I remember how hopeful I felt this past April when I checked the calendar I had hung on my bedroom door and realized Dad would be home in less than a hundred days. "Only ninety-nine more," I chanted on my way out to Fortune that afternoon with my legs pumping like pistons. "Ninety-nine more ... Ninety-nine more till life goes back to normal again."

I could see it all in my head, like a 3-D movie, as I sped past the tidy farmhouses and the plowed fields — Dad arriving back at the community rec center, marching in with all the other soldiers right on time. His face would light up when he spotted Nora and me in the crowd, wea