Travelers Rest Read Free

course, there was a second where  he asked himself, where he talked to himself like this— Now Robbie, Tonio is your brother and he came all the way out here to “help” you, and you like Julia, don’t you, and what about Dewey, great kid, and what about their disappointment, think about Julia and how she’ll have to try to make excuses for you again —but he’d already spent half his life disappointing people so now it didn’t stop him long. He stepped over as lightly as possible and carefully, very carefully separated the wallet from the keys—the keys were of no use to him—and unfolded the wallet and took out a few—no, all—of the bills. Tonio had credit cards. Tonio would be fine.
    He walked out of the room and down the creaky stairs and still no one interrupted him. At the bottom of the stairs he paused with his hand on the banister and surveyed the old, ghostly hotel lobby. Ladders, sawhorses, band saws, planks, bags of nails, God knew what all, you couldn’t see it very well in the dark—had to be a violation of every safety code imaginable. But the lobby itself—you could see how this must have been a pretty impressive place back in the day. Not that it interested him much. He exhaled slowly, and he told himself to consider the things they’d talked about in rehab, and he did consider them, but not in the way they would have wanted him to. What he’d heard them say over and over was that an addict could never get better until he wanted to get better, and that to want to get better you had to hit bottom, you had to see yourself as the lowest of the low. That was a comforting thought for Robbie, because he wasn’t anywhere near the bottom yet. There were a whole lot of depths left to sink to.
    The heavy front door to the hotel was unlocked, and that was a good thing, he could get back in if he wanted to. But he knew he wouldn’t. He struggled into his boots and went outside and shut the door behind him. The air was sharp, intense, the wind a bit more bracing than he had allowed for. But there across the street was the oasis he’d spotted right from the first, when they were walking up the hill with the suitcases. It was a bar called the Miner’s Hat, lit in the circle of a yellow streetlight, neon signs buzzing in the window, the snow flying round it in waves that accompanied the thump of a bass guitar coming from inside the door.
    The street was deserted except for a couple of cars parked near the entrance. Robbie crossed slowly, still aware that Tonio or Julia or Dewey could be watching from the window—wouldn’t do to be in a hurry. The snow in the street was already more than a foot deep. They’d have to call out the plows. Everything was utterly quiet. Pine trees stabbed the white sky on the tightly bunched hills. As he made his way across the street, he heard the click of the town’s one traffic light, and it switched from red to green. Go. There was the oasis, the bar, the bad music, the awful cover band. He tipped his head back, opened his mouth, closed his eyes, tasted the snow on his tongue and felt it on his eyelids. Then he opened his eyes and went across the street and blew on his stinging hands and reached for the door. Inside were the drunks and the losers and the beautiful loud noise—he could find every comfort he wanted here.

4
    F or the longest time after she saw the door across the street shut behind him she sat very still on some cushions in a little bay window, looking out at the snow.
    She had never seen it snow so hard in her life. She and Tonio and Dewey lived now in Charleston, South Carolina, or just outside Charleston, South Carolina, in a community called Mount Pleasant, and she had grown up mostly in California, in a succession of sunny beachside towns, so her knowledge and experience of snow were by no means extensive. Still, she had never seen it snow so hard in her life.
    The snow fell rapidly, flakes spinning down in the light, and if she stared hard enough