Desire Lines Read Free Page A

buildings with brand-name storefronts and fast-food islands in their parking lots. A few stores are new; others, their windows dark and empty, look recently abandoned. Their blankness makes her inexplicably sad.
It was twenty years ago, when Kathryn was eight, that she saw this town for the first time. She was riding in the cab of a sixty-foot-long moving van, sitting up on her knees to see over the dashboard. Her parents were following in the car behind; halfway through the interminable four-hour stretch of wilderness that led from Boston to Bangor, she convinced her father to let her ride with the two movers, her father’s cousin, Patrick, and a coarse longshoreman named Gus, for the rest of the trip.
“Middle of fuckin’ nowhere” was Gus’s only comment as they began passing exits for the town. He stubbed a cigarette into the ashtray for emphasis.
“Long as there’s a bar somewhere, it’s okay with me,” Patrick said.
“Oh, sure, there’s a bar here. Has to be. Nothing else to do in a place like this but drink.”
Gus lit another cigarette and Kathryn looked out at the few motels scattered along the highway like birds on a telephone wire. Every few miles they passed houses clustered around an overpass. The town of Bangor seemed to be mostly trees, the houses just a little oasis in a desert of forest. There weren’t many cars on the road in either direction. The place looked unnaturally clean, as if someone had taken a scrubber and soaped it up, rinsed it down.
Kathryn’s grandmother, who was born and raised in Bangor, had told her stories about the town—about what it was like before it had an airport, back when the train still came up from Portland, stopping along the way to pick up passengers and produce and dry goods. Heading south, the train carried potatoes from Fort Kent, blueberries from Cherryfield, raw lumber from the Maine woods. As a child her grandmother had sat in her bedroom window and watched the black smoke rise from the valley, closing her eyes to hear the slow-chugging train as it passed, the low haunt of the whistle.
“You crying?” Patrick asked Kathryn, peering at her closely.
She wiped her eyes. “I—It’s just the smoke.”
“Put your goddamn ciggy out, Gus, you’re making the poor girl sick,” Patrick said.
Gus looked at her sideways, then ground the butt into the dashboard and dropped it on the floor. “Can’t take it, maybe she shouldn’t be riding up here.”
“Oh, relax. We’re almost there, ya bully.”
Kathryn sat very still between them, looking out at the gray road stretching ahead into oblivion, the gray sky, shoebox houses hunched forlornly against the hills, separated from the highway by chain-link fencing. She was sure they were going to the end of civilization. Her eyes began to water again, and she tried to choke back the tears.
“What grade you in?” Patrick asked kindly.
“Third.”
“So you’ll be going to a new school. Could be fun.”
She shrugged. “I guess so.”
“Ever been here before?”
“To visit my grandparents.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “But that was different.”
He nods. “You knew you’d be leaving.”
“Yeah,” she said miserably.
He squinted out the side window. “I grew up in a place like this. It’s not so bad. And it’s not true you can’t leave,” he said, looking down at her. “You can, but you have to be headstrong to do it. Then again, you might come to like it. There’s a lot to be said for living in a small town.”
“Like what?” Gus said.
“People know you. There’s such a thing called neighbors, Gus—ever heard of ‘em? Take my word for it, they’re a whole different breed than the vagrants and pimps that congregate on your street. When’s the last time anyone brought you a tuna casserole?”
“I hate tuna casserole.”
Patrick smiled down at Kathryn. “Well, then. It’s a good thing old Gus here ain’t moving to Bangor, Maine, now, isn’t it?”
THEY STOP AT a light, and