Travelers Rest Read Free Page B

laugh. “I’m your sister-in-law,” she said. “I’m Julia.”
    And she could go back to that one moment. Until that one moment there really wasn’t anything all that unusual. She had looked out the window. She had seen him in his red shirt working on the fence. He had long brown hair then, so thick that it looked like some kind of pelt he had to keep displacing to the side of his head––but it hadn’t mattered how he looked. She had been aware of how she looked herself, a tiny thing there in the grass, all of five foot two, weighing in at about a hundred pounds, no breasts no hips no curves to speak of. What she understood then, for maybe the first time, was that it was her eyes that held men’s attention. She could feel them there in her head, staring out at him, warm and big and brown. Robbie was seventeen then. She was twenty-five.
    She had always believed strongly in a spirit world, in the idea that nature was animated in a way she could never quite understand or see, but never very strongly in God, who, if he existed, didn’t seem to be much good for anything. And she had always believed in fate, that there was some place she was destined to end up, and from the beginning, she had felt that Robbie had something to do with that place. But why? Because she and Robbie were alike? Her mother had been a late-blooming flower child, and she had raised her daughters around people who claimed to be enlightened, to have tapped into some higher consciousness, but who were really just losers and hypocrites and fools. At times, when things went sour at a moment’s notice, they’d had to live in abandoned cabins or tents or vans or even other people’s garages—she was used to that. She was used to screwups like Robbie. And there was something she didn’t trust about people who did everything right, or something she didn’t trust, when in the presence of people who did everything right, about herself.
    But if there was such a thing as fate, if there was some place, some moment she was destined to travel toward, she believed strongly that it was her job to get herself there. Robbie could and should take care of himself. A grown man, a thirty-year-old man, who’d never had a steady job, who had dropped out of college four times. She had never had the chance to go to college once.
    She could just picture him over there in the bar. He’d be everyone’s best friend in about five minutes. Good God, you’d think he’d learn. That’s why they were out here, collecting Robbie after yet another stay in rehab with a bunch of other spoiled rich kid degenerates, privileged people who couldn’t control the one thing in the world you had the capacity to control—yourself. She’d had a difficult childhood and didn’t feel much sympathy.
    The thing to do right now was wake up Tonio. He would be over there in no time hustling Robbie back out into the snow, bringing him back to bed, and they could get on the road in the morning. But then he would see that they had power across the street, and she’d never hear the end of it. And also she wanted to believe—against all evidence—that Robbie could manage on his own. Maybe he was over there having a cheeseburger. Maybe he’d have a beer for a nightcap and then she’d see him wander leisurely back across the road.
    Everything was dark and quiet behind her in the hotel room—Tonio was done with his snoring, even—and the snow beyond the window fell so steadily that she couldn’t imagine it stopping. She tried to think of their house in Mount Pleasant, the row of azaleas to the side of the front door, the oak tree in the yard, Dewey bouncing a basketball in the driveway. She tried to think of the places where she’d spent her childhood, in California, the house with the pool where they’d crashed for a while, the bus she used to take to the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. None of it was there, not anywhere in her head, just this window framing the snow, her place tucked right