Envious Moon(43)

That second morning at the cabin, we opened the door to cloudy skies and a cool, rawboned day. It looked like rain when I stopped at the log cabin and dropped the keys in a wooden box there for this purpose. Out on the rural highway, Hannah turned to me in the cab.

“Anthony,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I need clothes.”

I looked at her and I felt so stupid and selfish. She had come directly with me that night at her school, and had not packed a bag. She had on the same jeans and T-shirt and sweater she had that night. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I completely spaced.”

“And you need to do laundry.”

“I do?”

She nodded. “Your clothes stink.”

I lifted the front of my shirt up to my nose and smelled it. Sweat and cigarettes. “You’re right,” I said.

We continued to drive north through beautiful country. We were following a meandering brook that disappeared from the road before bending back alongside it. The heavy pine forest came right to the edge of the road and now and again when we came up a hill, we could see blue mountains in the distance.

Outside of Rutland the rain came, and it fell so hard the shoddy wipers on the truck could barely keep it off the glass. We got burgers at a drive-through and then we pulled into the parking lot of a giant strip mall. I pointed. “Wal-Mart,” I said. “We’ll get you clothes there.”

Hannah looked at me. “Are you serious?”

I shrugged. “Got a better idea?”

We held hands and walked through the wide aisles of the store like some married couple. She was used to shopping in fancy stores in Boston, but she didn’t even have a wallet, and the only money we had was the cash that I took from under the carpet that night. This was not a time to be picky. And Hannah, to her credit, managed to give in to it, and while I waited she modeled things for me, a pair of jeans that fit her like a glove, a white button-down shirt, and a sundress that I loved, blue and white checked, and short enough that when she moved its bottom hem swayed and showed off all of her lovely tanned legs. We bought her two sweaters and a coat, underwear and socks. We filled a cart with clothes. And when we pushed the cart out to the truck in the rain, her arm was looped in mine, and I knew that this may not be what she was accustomed to, but that on some level she was grateful.

Farther down the same strip, we found a Laundromat and I brought my bag inside and got change out of the machine. The place was empty, other than the old woman who ran it, sitting on a folding chair watching a soap opera on a small black-and-white television. All my stuff fit into one of the big washers and Hannah and I sat down in the middle of a row of molded plastic seats to wait for it.

Hannah leaned into me and she rested her head on my shoulder. She was bored. “We’ll be out of here soon,” I said.

“Then what?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t. Next to me on the seat was a stack of magazines and I picked up the one on the top. Vermont Life, it was called. I flipped it over and on the back was a picture of these new homes on top of a mountain. In the picture they were surrounded by snow and they looked quite beautiful. A-frames with big windows. Tall pine trees around them and you could see where the land dropped off and there was a hint of broad valley behind them. They were winter houses for rich people, the kind of people Hannah had known her whole life. The kind of person Hannah was when she wasn’t with me. I pointed at the picture. “How about here?” I said.

Hannah looked down at it. “Stratton Mountain,” she said, reading from the caption.

“What do you think?” I said. “We’ll go there and get ourselves one of these houses. Live on top of a mountain. Learn how to ski or something. Wake up every morning and look across the valley.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

I stood up. “Excuse me,” I said to the old lady watching her soap. She turned in her seat and looked at me. I held up the magazine to her and she was too far to see it real good but she peered at it anyway. “Do you know where this is? Stratton Mountain?”

She turned back to her show. “About half hour south,” she said.

“We must have passed it.”

She didn’t look back at me. “Depends what way you came.”

I didn’t answer the old woman. I sat back down and I smiled at Hannah. I nudged her with my elbow. “We’ll get one of these houses,” I said. She rolled her eyes at me and I loved her for it.





On the road heading south, we crested a hill and something happened that I had only seen in the middle of the North Atlantic. The sun cracked through the clouds and it shone brightly on the front of the truck while the bed behind was pounded with heavy rain. Two worlds in a matter of inches.

At a gas station I filled up and then I left Hannah in the truck and I went into the phone booth. After I dialed, the machine came on and told me I owed a dollar seventy-five and I pumped the quarters into it. A click and then it was ringing. Berta answered on the third ring.

“Hello, Mama,” I said.

She spoke to me in Portuguese. Either someone was there or she knew they had tapped the lines. She told me to come home, to turn myself in. It was the only way out of this mess, she said.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “This is my life. I’m living it.”