This isn't weird.

Last Minute Midwife

Ben was fairly certain that Dewberry Creek could not be said to constitute a town. He wasn't even sure it could meet the criteria for village. Hamlet seemed plausible. Neighborhood, maybe? So far, he'd spotted more horses than houses. More like neighborhood.

Oh, Millie would have loved that.

There seemed to be effectively two roads in the entire town (paved, but just barely), one north-south (Dewberry Lane), one east-west (Harrison Street), and the four-way stop where they intersected appeared to be what Dewberry Creek considered its downtown. His eye was drawn first to the most prominent structure, a church with a single stained glass window and an oddly stubby steeple topped by a disproportionately tall cross. It was painted white, and suspiciously barn shaped. A readerboard on the lawn read simply, CONGRATS P TE. Wherever P TE was, Ben decided that he was happy for him.

The church was flanked on one side by a single pump gas station and on the other by an aging prefab diner painted an anemic shade of seafoam green. The sign mounted to the roof boasted its name far more proudly than it should have: MEG'S EGGS & LEGS. Ben disliked that. He disliked that very much.

Across the street, businesses were crowded together in a compact row, their storefronts so flat that they could almost be mistaken for stage props, two-dimensional backdrops that could be carried off to make way for the next scene. At least three of them were vacant, with boarded up windows and ghostly outlines where marquees had been pried away from the bricks, but a few yet survived; a general store, a barber, a post office, and a pawn shop all seemed to be open. A few hundred yards or so down Harrison Street, a squat clapboard building with a corrugated steel roof promised liquor and cigarettes. Its closest neighbor, a violently Texan saloon with no less than four Lone Star flags flying and a giant spoked wheel fixed to its gable, promised liquor and dancing.

A similar distance north on Dewberry Lane, he encountered an austere brownstone building that seemed far too small to serve its purported function (DEWBERRY HIGH SCHOOL, engraved on a monument sign at the parking lot entrance), but on closer examination of the sign, the building in fact proved to house the middle school as well. The kindergarten and elementary school followed on the adjoining lot, but rather than a single building, it was made up of eight or so beige trailers. To their credit, the trailers looked much newer and cleaner than the high school.

Further ahead, Ben came upon a fire department and police station, both of which looked to him like miniaturized versions of the real thing, an equally undersized medical clinic, and then yet another whitewashed chapel, spindlier than the first and sharing a grassy acre with a poorly maintained cemetery.

A few residential homes were scattered here and there between the various public institutions, but the majority resided well outside the meager sector of commercial development along the Dewberry/Harrison intersection, and were set a fair distance back from the main road down long gravel driveways. Many of the homes could only be identified as such by the lonely mailboxes standing sentry at the end of their driveways; the houses themselves were obscured by uncleared forest. The visible ones varied in size and age—modest ranch style homes, dignified old farm houses, doublewide trailers. Some of them were accompanied by barns or chicken coops, and enclosed within wooden or barbed wire fences that corralled handfuls of horses or goats; he even spotted one ostrich. Cows began appearing in respectable numbers a few short miles later, where the properties grew ever more sprawling—at that point, though technically still in Dewberry Creek per Google maps, Ben decided that it didn't count, and turned around for one more look at the town proper.

He was procrastinating. Now that he was actually here, the immediate reality of actually meeting Walt—the Walt—had him jittering with anxiety. As astoundingly easy as he had been to talk to on the phone, Ben found himself turning over all the same questions. Maybe Walt really wouldn't like him. He'd traveled a full two days to get here, and essentially invited himself. Maybe Walt would feel obligated to entertain him, and resent the imposition. Maybe this was a mistake.