Off Course Read Free

vehicle scrubbed of logos, they bumped along a logging road through stands of ponderosa and Jeffrey pines, and hundred-foot Doug firs. In a flat open space, Jakey parked and started kissing her. His body heat and mass were memorable. She had never kissed a man so large, or so much older—twenty-one years, almost to the day—and never had one ever shown such an interest in her.
    â€œGood stars,” he said. “Shouldn’t waste ’em.”
    So they climbed out of the truck. The moon, oblong and coolly bright, lit the landscape so that every leaf and rock was distinct as in a nighttime diorama. “What’s that?” she asked about a messy pink dust cloud.
    â€œThat? The Milky damn Way,” Jakey said, and tugged her down onto a slippery bed of needles. In no time, he was at her buttons. Well, what did I expect? she thought, and went along. They made love urgently, sweetly, ending a few yards down from where they started.
    A little precipitous, thought Cress. But Jakey was so affectionate and grateful. God knows when he’d last had sex.
    She was a bit rusty herself in that department.
    Jakey tugged her jeans back up and kissed her so lovingly, she felt selfless, exalted, as if she’d answered a prayer. The deep dark sky, spattered, no, silted with stars, spread its faint eternal light. Slowly she grew aware of pine needles pricking through her clothes.
    Jakey unlocked the lodge and they had a nightcap at the bar in the dark. And another. He dropped her off at the foot of her driveway. Trembling, as if freshly anointed—he was the first adult she’d known from her parents’ world to desire her—she walked up to the A-frame.
    The next morning, hanging up the velvet coat, Cress saw, on the back, flattened spots of resin with bits of pine needles and grit ground in, small dirty galaxies. She never could get them off and had to throw the coat away.

 
    Two
    Cress’s sister, Sharon, was thirteen when Carl Abajanian, a pale, skinny boy with black hair, asked her to go steady and gave her a Saint Christopher medal. What awoke embarrassed pleasure in Sharon changed the family’s life forever. “Nobody is going on a date, let alone going steady until they are at least sixteen,” Sylvia Hartley declared. “If then.” The cheap white enameled disk was returned, and weekly camping trips commenced in a steady rotation of mountains, desert, and beach. The Chevy wagon was soon replaced by a black-and-red VW van, outfitted—to save money—by Sam himself with a tiny fridge and a hip-bruising table-with-benches that folded into beds. Every Friday afternoon, Sylvia stowed duffels and groceries in the van and ordered the girls in after; they drove for hours, pitching camp in darkness and waking up to Joshua trees, pines, or thundering surf. Sylvia Hartley had a small inheritance from her mother and wherever they went—Arrowhead, Anza-Borrego, Gaviota—she and Sam looked at vacation property. Cress learned to read and to draw in a moving car, and how to pull in deep, so time would pass in a blip.
    On a Sunday morning in early June, they were breaking camp on the banks of the Kern River when Sylvia, always fond of a map, spotted a little-known pass over the Sierras. They took it east to west, switchbacking through red-limbed manzanita and white-flowering elderberry. The only vehicles they met were logging trucks that downshifted with terrible roars, their hydraulic brakes gasping and spitting. Mosaics of bark on the transported logs smeared past the van’s windows only a few feet from Cress’s face.
    After an hour of climbing, the road straightened out along a high ridge with tall pines and granite boulders. In a few miles, just where the road began its westerly descent, a large new log building stood on the left, its pale wood still raw and shiny with shellac. A banner hung from the rafters: THE MEADOWS LODGE GRAND OPENING . Below that, stuck