Anywhere But Here Read Free

she says, when she’s going to sue, she’ll get her kids’ college educations out of this, I know how it’s done.”
    The woman laughed and slammed her car door shut. She rolled down her window. “Barry’s Hanover might have a mechanic in on Saturday,” she called to the policeman.
    “Mom, I’m hungry.” My rump was cold and it seemed we might be there all night.
    “Well, we have to stay,” she said. “If we’d just checked in, then we’d be there now, probably eating, no, we’d be finished. We’d probably be having dessert. But now we have to wait.”
    “For how long?”
    “I don’t know.”
    The policeman came over to us, still holding his notebook. “We’ve done all we can do until tomorrow,” he said. “Now I’ll take you wherever you want to go and you can just leave the car here and call in the morning and have her towed.”
    “They’re probably not even going to have room left at the hotel now,” she said to me.
    The policeman had freckles on his arms and his hands, like my mother. He put the notebook in his back pocket. “Now, you are both welcome to stay with my wife and I for the night, if you’re worried. There’s plenty of extra room.”
    “Oh, no, thank you, though, we couldn’t.”
    “Because it wouldn’t be any trouble. And my wife makes a mean apple pie.” He looked at me.
    “Thank you, but no, really.” My mother inspired offers like that, often. I didn’t know until I was older how unusual that is. “But would you mind dropping us off at the Luau?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Nice place.”
    We both sat in the backseat while he drove. The windows were covered with chicken wire. “I just hope they still have room,” my mother said, stretching her fingers out on the seat and looking down at their nails.
    The thing about my mother and me is that when we get along, we’re just the same. Exactly. And at the Luau Hotel, we were happy. Waiting for our car to be fixed, we didn’t talk about money. It was so big, we didn’t think about it. We lay on our stomachs on the king-sized bed, our calves tangling up behind us, readingnovels. I read
Gone With the Wind
. Near the end, I locked myself in the bathroom, stopping up my face with a towel. After a while she knocked on the door.
    “Honey, let me in, I want to tell you something!” I made myself keep absolutely still. “Don’t worry, Honey, she gets him back later. She gets him again in the end.”
    We loved the swimming pool. Those days we were waiting for our car to be fixed, we lay out from ten until two, because my mother had read that those were the best tanning hours. That was what we liked doing, improving ourselves: lying sprawled out on the reclining chairs, rubbed with coconut suntan oil, turning the pages of new-bought magazines. Then we’d go in the pool, me cannonballing off the diving board for the shock of it, my mother starting in one corner of the shallow end, both her arms out to the sides, skimming the surface as she stepped in gradually, smiling wide, saying, “Eeeeeeeee.”
    My mother wore a white suit, I swam in gym shorts. While I was lying on a chair, once, she picked up my foot and looked down my leg. “Apricot,” she said.
    At home, one farmer put in a swimming pool, fenced all around with aluminum. That summer, Ben and I sat in the fields outside, watching through the diamond spaces of the fence. Sometimes the son would try and chase us away and throw rocks at us, little sissy pieces of gravel.
    “Public property!” we screamed back at him. We were sitting in Guns Field. We kids all knew just who owned what land.
    Every afternoon, late, after the prime tanning hours, we went out. Dressing took a long time. My mother called room service for a pitcher of fresh lemonade, told them not too much sugar, but some sugar, like yesterday, a pinch, just enough so it was sweet. Sweet, but a little tart, too. Come to think of it, yesterday tasted a little too tart, but the day before was