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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Paullina Simons

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One: Chloe and Mason and Hannah and Blake

Chapter 1: Insanity’s Horse

Chapter 2: Sweet Potato

Chapter 3: The Perils of College Interviews

Chapter 4: Paleo Flood at Red River

Chapter 5: The Irish Inquisition

Chapter 6: Mottos

Chapter 7: Olivia the Dancing Pig

Chapter 8: Empty Wells and Vernal Pools

Chapter 9: Red Vineyard

Chapter 10: Lupe

Chapter 11: Moody

Chapter 12: Peacocks

Chapter 13: Uncle Kenny from Kilkenny

Chapter 14: The Meaning of Typos

Chapter 15: She Will Be Loved

Part Two: Johnny Rainbow

Chapter 16: Modern Travel

Chapter 17: Carmen in Carnikava

Chapter 18: Cherry Strudel

Chapter 19: Zhenya

Chapter 20: Thorn Forests

Chapter 21: The Guider of Guiri, the Singer of Songs

Chapter 22: All Things Are Numbers

Chapter 23: Lost Children

Chapter 24: Missing Time

Chapter 25: Roses for a Farm

Chapter 26: Dread

Chapter 27: Emil

Chapter 28: Warsaw

Chapter 29: The Dragon and the Honey

Chapter 30: Instead of Auschwitz

Chapter 31: The Clock in Trieste

Chapter 32: A Town Called Heartbreak

Chapter 33: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Chapter 34: My Rags of Heart

Chapter 35: Jimmy Eat World Pain

Part Three: The Blue Suitcase

Chapter 36: Freshman Summer

Chapter 37: Sophomore Summer

Chapter 38: Junior Summer

Chapter 39: Senior Summer

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Part One
Chloe and Mason and Hannah and Blake

We’re not serious when we are seventeen.

One fine evening, full of pints and lemonade,

In rowdy cafes with their dazzling chandeliers,

We stroll under the linden trees in the park.

Now you’re in love, till August anyway.

You’ll make her laugh, you’ll write her poetry

At night you wander back to the cafes

For more pints and lemonade …

We are not serious when we are seventeen,

And when we have green linden trees in the park.

Arthur Rimbaud, “Romance”

1
Insanity’s Horse

CHLOE SAT ALONE ON THE BUS RIDE HOME ACROSS THE TRAIN tracks, dreaming of the beaches of Barcelona and perhaps of being ogled by a lusting stranger. She was trying to drown out Blake, Mason and Hannah verbally tripping over one another as if in a game of drunken Twister as they loudly argued the pros and cons of writing a story for money. Threads of songs played their crowded lyric notes in the static inside her head. Under the boardwalk like no other lover he took my hand and said I love you forever—all suddenly overpowered by Queen’s matchless yawp Barcelonaaaaaaaaa …!

She placed her palm against the glass. The bus was almost at their road. Maybe then this psychodrama would end. Outside the dusty windows, made muddy by the flood of recent rain, past the railroad, near a clearing of poplars, Chloe spied a fading billboard of a giant rainbow, which two white-suited workmen on ladders were papering over with an ad for the renovated Mount Washington Resort in the White Mountains.

She had just enough time to glimpse the phrase on the soon to be obscured poster before the bus lunged past it. “Johnny Get Your Gun.” This left her to contemplate, alas not in perfect silence, the philosophical meaning behind a rainbow being papered over.

Just before the bus stopped, she remembered where the sign was from. It was an ad for the Lone Star Pawn and Gun Shop in Fryeburg. Remembering it didn’t answer Chloe’s larger question, but it answered the immediate one.

“What idiot thought a rainbow was a good symbol for a gun store?” Hannah’s mother had said. Soured on men and life, she had pawned her engagement ring there. Got seventy bucks for it. Took Chloe and Hannah for lobster in North Conway with the money.

They all got food poisoning afterward. So much for rainbows.

Is that what they called karma?

Or was it simply what happened next?

On the dot of 3:40 in the afternoon, the small blue bus pulled up—extra carefully and slowly—to the pine trees at the beginning of Wake Drive, a dirt road past another dirt road marked with a rock painted with a black whale. Four kids jumped off into the dust.

Because it was the merry month of May, and almost warm, they wore the clothes of the young out in the boonies—denim and plaid. Though to be fair, that’s all they ever wore, blizzard or heatwave.

In what universe could a five-minute speech by Mrs. Mencken about the annual Acadia Award for Short Fiction at the end of English period right before lunch—when there wasn’t a soul in class who was paying attention to anything but the rumble in their empty stomachs—result in Blake and Mason deciding they were suddenly writers and not trash collectors?

“Character is everything,” Chloe said doggedly into the dirt. “Character is story.”

The mile of unpaved road at the end of which they lived was all downhill between dense pines. It meandered through the thick forest, getting narrower, crossing the train tracks, hugging the small lake, ending in pine needles and disarray, not a road anymore, just dust, and that’s where they lived. Where the road ended.

Chloe and Mason and Hannah and Blake. Two couples, two brothers, two best friends. A short girl, a tall girl, and two brawny dudes. Well, Blake was brawny. The scrappy Mason was all about sports the last few years, ever since their dad had his back broken. Mason was a soccer midfielder and a varsity shortstop. Blake got the lumbering body of a man who lived in a rural town and could do anything: lift anything, build anything, drive anything. Blake’s wavy, bushy hair hadn’t been cut in months, his beard was weeks overgrown. The brown Timberlands were grimy. The belt was six years old. The extra large plaid shirt was his dad’s. The Levi’s were hand-me-downs. His light brown eyes darted around, dancing, laughing, full of good humor.

Next to him, his smaller brother looked like a child of prissy aristocracy. Mason’s hair was shaggy straight, but it was meant to be shaggy. It was designer shag. Unlike Blake, who rolled out of bed, hair slept on, and ran to school, Mason woke early and worked hard to make his hair just so. The girls loved his hair, and tortured Chloe about it. Oh Chloe, they chirped, you’re so lucky, you can run your hands through it any time you want. Mason shaved every day, and did not wear plaid. He wore black and gray T-shirts. He was monochrome and his jeans were washed yesterday. On his feet were sneakers. He didn’t cut wood, he played ball. He didn’t look like Blake’s brother, with his compact lean build, intense blue eyes, and his serious, gentle face. Plus, unlike Blake, he was a boy of few words. When he quietly held Chloe’s hand, it was always with kindness. He didn’t pull on her, yank her, demand action from her. He was a gentleman. Not that Blake didn’t try to be a gentleman with Hannah. Just that he was a lot like the German Shepherd he once owned. Panting, unapologetically getting mud on everyone’s floors, dripping ice cream and tomato sauce all over, loping wild through the day. You couldn’t help but feel exasperated affection at his constant antics.

And next to Blake walked Hannah.

Though Chloe herself found Hannah to be slightly androgynous with her tall, boyish body—straight hips, straight waist, small high breasts, short hair always slicked back away from her face—other people, boys especially, did not agree. Her face was opalescent and scrubbed clean, with symmetrical, correct, in-balance features and a gaze as straight as her narrow hips. Her eyes, brown and unblinking, were serious and appraising, making Hannah look as though she were engaged—as though she were listening. Chloe knew it was a ruse: the steady stare allowed Hannah to be lost inside her head. She wore makeup she could ill afford, but strived to look as though she just splashed water on her face and, voila, perfection. With fluid grace Hannah strolled like a ballerina.

At the long mirror in her room she had practiced her arabesques and soubresauts, hoping one day she would stop growing and her parents could afford ballet classes. She finally got her lessons in the divorce settlement, but by then she was five-ten and too tall to be lifted into the air by anyone but Blake, who was definitely not a ballet dancer.

With a detached elegance, Hannah walked and talked as if she didn’t belong in tiny Fryeburg, Maine. She fancied herself barely even belonging in this country. She wore ballet flats, for God’s sake! Even when she schlepped a mile through the mud and pine needles. No butch Timberlands for her. Hannah walked with her shoulder blades flung back, as though wearing heels and a Chanel blazer. She carried herself as if she was too good for the place that by an unlucky accident of birth she had found herself living in, and couldn’t wait until the moment she was sipping wine on the Left Bank and painting the Seine with other artistic, beautiful people. Her big round eyes were permanently moist. She evaluated you before she cried, and then you loved her. That was Hannah. Always crying to be loved.

Chloe in stark contrast was not moist of eye or long of limb. She didn’t care much about not being tall when she wasn’t with Hannah. But next to her reed-like friend, she felt like an armadillo.

One of Chloe’s best physical features was her brown hair, straw-straight, shining, streaked with sunlight. There was nothing she did to make it great. It just was. Every day washed, brushed, clean, unfussy, thin-spun silk falling from her head. She wore no makeup, to differentiate herself from the senior girls who were all about the heavy eyeliner, the flimsy tanks, the one size too small jeans and three-inch (or higher!) mules in which they clodded through the Fryeburg Academy halls, always in danger of falling over or tripping, and perhaps that was the point. Sexy but helpless. Both things were anathema to Chloe, so she kept her body to herself and walked in sensible shoes. Where was she going that required getting dressed up? Bowling? Italian ices? Swimming in the lake? Gardening? Exactly. And she heard the way the boys talked about the girls who dressed the way, say, that hateful Mackenzie O’Shea dressed. A lifetime of meds wouldn’t be able to erase the trauma for Chloe if she thought boys talked about her that way.

Her face, unblemished and fair, suffered slightly from this pretend plainness, but there was no hiding the upper curve of her cheekbones or her wide-set eyes that tilted slightly upward, always in a smile. She had inherited the Irish lips from her father, but the eyes and cheeks from her mother, and because of that, her face, just like her body, wasn’t quite in proportion. The ratio of eyes to lips was not in balance, just as the ratio of body to breasts was not in balance. There was not enough body for the milk-fed breasts she had been cursed with. There may have been a genetic component to the comical chaos inside her—to her math abilities colliding with her existential confusion—but there was simply no cosmic excuse for her palmfuls of breasts.

Chloe blamed her mother.

It was only right.

She blamed her mother for everything.

Look at Hannah. Everything on that girl was assembled as if hand-picked. Tall, lithe, lean, eyes mouth hair nose all the right size, not too big, not too small, while Chloe spent her life hiding under minimizer bras and one-size-too-big shirts. She was afraid no one would take her seriously if they thought of her as a body instead of a person. Who’d ever listen to her explanations about the movements of the stars or migrations of mitochondria or beheadings in a revolution if they thought she was just a pair of boobs with legs. Too heavy-breasted to be a ballerina and too short to be a bombshell.

That Mason didn’t agree—or said he didn’t—only spoke to his poor judgment.

The bus had been dropping them off on the same rural road for thirteen years. Kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, fancy high school.

Soon there would be no more blue buses, no more lurching afternoon rides. In a month they would all be graduating.

And then?

Well, and then, there was this:

“Don’t be hating on my story already, Chloe,” said Blake. “It just began. Give it a chance. It’s a good story. You’ll see.”

“Yeah, Chloe,” echoed Mason. Being ten months younger than Blake, he looked up to his older brother, though he did not necessarily disagree with Chloe, as evidenced by his cheerful wink. She took his welcome hand as they strolled past old Mr. Leary out on the lawn, surrounded by every bit of garbage scrap he owned, trying to make it look less garbagey so he could sell it.

“Blake, dear boy,” Mr. Leary called out, “you said you’d come by after school and help me with my block saw. I still can’t get the dang thing to turn on.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Leary.”

“Block saw?” muttered Mason. “What does that codger need with a block saw? It’s soft dirt all around him.”

“He wants to build a bomb shelter,” Blake said out of the corner of his mouth, smiling at the old man as they ambled by. “That’s why he’s collecting the cinder blocks.”

“What’s a block saw?” asked Chloe.

“Who cares,” said Hannah. “A bomb shelter? Guy’s a freak.”

“Blake, not now?” The craggy man persisted. “I have some snacks for you and your friends. Donuts.”

“Thank you, sir, but not now.”

Because now Blake was busy. He had to clear the brush from the dusty path of his own winding life.

All the trouble began when Blake turned eighteen last July and was allowed to enter the Woodsmen Day competition at the Fryeburg Fair. He entered five contests. Tree felling, crosscut sawing, axe throwing, log rolling, and block chop. He lost the crosscut and the log roll and the block chop, and you’d think he’d remember that and be humbled—that he lost three out of five—but no. He beat the best time that year on tree felling by six seconds, coming in at twenty-three seconds flat, and he set a Fair record on the axe throw with six bullseyes in a row.

You’d think his head was the bullseye: it swelled to four feet in diameter. He strutted down the dirt roads and through Academy halls like an Olympic gold medalist. Chloe would remind him that the Fryeburg Academy—which all the local kids attended for “free” through a tax deal between the school and the state of Maine—was one of the most prestigious preparatory high schools in the United States. “No one here gives a toss about your axe toss, I promise you,” Chloe would say to him, but you’d think he were deaf.

It was right after that Blake and Mason entered the business competition for Mr. Smith’s tech class—and they won! Mason was used to winning, with his dozen sports trophies lining the dresser, but Blake became impossible. He acted as if he could do anything. Like, for example, write.

It wasn’t that they didn’t deserve to win. The project was: “Create a successful business.” Who knew that Blake and Mason would take the thing they had been doing part-time and turn it into a winner. With their dad’s ancient truck, they had been going to houses around the lakes in Brownfield and Fryeburg and asking if, for a small fee, the residents would let them cart their trash away. Now, most people in this part of Maine aimed their shotguns to point the brothers in the direction of the exit to their property, but there were some—widows, the feeble-minded—who agreed to pay them a few nickels to cart away their old refrigerators, non-working snow blowers, rusty rakes, newspapers, chainsaws. The boys were strong and worked hard, and after school and on Saturdays, they would drive around and try not to get killed while they made a few dollars. After placing an ad in the Penny Saver, they discovered there was already a national junk company called 1-800-GOT-JUNK. This only fired up their cutthroat spirit. They flattered Hannah into designing their logo: THE HAUL BROTHERS HAULING SERVICES. “WE HAUL SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO.”

It looked pretty good. They got a decal made, slapped it on their father’s truck, painted the truck a hideous lime green—Blake said because it was the color farthest removed from the color of the crap they were hauling—used their rudimentary buttering-up skills to get Chloe to create a profit and loss statement, and figured out that if they worked full-time, hired two more guys, and bought another truck with a lift, they would make six figures at the end of three years. Six figures! They had an advertising plan: Yellow Pages, the North Conway Observer, local ads on TV, three radio spots—and then their dad’s Chevy died.

It was over twenty years old. Burt Haul had bought the V8 diesel powerhouse in 1982, before he knew he’d be having sons who a generation later would need it to start a fake business. Burt loved that truck so much that even after the accident that nearly ended his life, he refused to let it go and spent his own scarce money rebuilding it. “I drove your mother home from our wedding in that truck,” Burt told his sons. “The only reason I’m alive today is because of that truck. I ain’t parting with that thing.”

But now the truck engine was like Mr. Leary’s gas-powered block saw. Defunct.

No one had money for a new truck, even a used one. Burt and his boys were being shamefully carted around in Janice Haul’s Subaru. Were they even men?

Hannah and Chloe tried to console their disappointed boyfriends by reminding them that their business wasn’t really a business, it was just a business on paper, which is no kind of business at all. But Blake and Mason had fallen too far into the trap of a dream. Chloe knew something about that. The Haul boys had been so sold on their own pseudo-company that they decided to drop out of school in the middle of senior year and work until they got the money together to buy a truck, figuring that in their line of work a high school diploma was about as useful as watering grass during a downpour.

It was a challenge for the girls to keep their boyfriends in school. It was Chloe who had finally hit on the winning combination of words: “Do you think my mother and father would ever allow me to hang out with high school dropouts?”

That worked, though not as instantly as Chloe had hoped, alas.

So … the senior year passed, truck still broke, and Janice not only had to drive to work and shop for the family, but share her inadequate station wagon with two restless boys with divergent friends, interests and schedules. To make money, the boys shoveled snow, cut grass, did shopping for the infirm, Blake mostly, because Mason was at varsity. Fast forward to today when they were hopping off buses and yammering on about dreams. You had to hand it to them. Those two were single-minded in their pursuits. All their pursuits.

“Chloe, speak up. Listen to what I’m saying. Why isn’t it a good story?” Blake always got irked by her tight-lipped approach to his shenanigans.

“Because so far you haven’t told me anything I’d want to read,” she said.

“I haven’t stopped speaking!”

Chloe opened her hands in a my-point-precisely. “Who are the main characters?”

“It doesn’t matter who they are. Can I finish before you judge?”

“You mean you haven’t finished? And I’m not judging.”

“You so judge. That’s your biggest problem.”

“I’m not—”

Blake put his finger out, nearly to her mouth. “The premise of my story is—are you listening? Two dudes run a junkyard.”

“That part I got.”

“They do say write about what you know.”

“I. Got. That. Part.”

“Two dudes run a junkyard and one day they find something awful.”

“Like what? All you cart away is Wise potato chips and Oreo wrappers.”

“And condom wrappers.” Blake grinned, slowed down, and threw his big arm around Chloe’s shoulder.

“Hannah, control your boyfriend.” Chloe pushed him away. “But okay, even still. Where is the story?”

“Can there be anything more full of story possibilities than a ninety-year-old woman throwing out a Hefty bag full of used condoms?” Blake laughed.

“Not used condoms,” Mason corrected him. “Condom wrappers.”

Chloe glanced at the silent Hannah for support. “Can we move on? What else have you got?”

“We don’t know yet,” Mason said. “Hannah, you think it’s good so far, don’t you?”

“So far there’s nothing!” That was Chloe.

“He wasn’t asking you!” said Blake.

They had ten minutes before they reached home to hammer it out. It wasn’t enough time. Blake pulled them off road, away from home and onto the train tracks that ran through the woods and divided their small part of the lake from the better, larger part. Arms out, backpacks on, they balanced on the rusty tracks and skipped on the ties.

Writing a story for money! What a thing. Acadia’s first prize was ten thousand dollars. Chloe knew the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction had been around longer and was certainly more prestigious, but it paid only a thousand dollars, and you had to write at least forty thousand words for it. No matter how bad one was at math, dividing forty thousand words into a thousand bucks was an awful return. “All work and no pay,” said Mason, and laughed for five minutes at his own joke.

But here—ten thousand dollars for a novella. Blake didn’t even know what a novella was until Chloe told him. To the brothers, a sum that large was the lottery. It was a new truck and the start of their own business. It was the rest of their lives. They acted as if they found it lying under a tree in a suitcase. All that was left to do was count the money.

And little naysay-y Chloe was not allowed to even mention that:

1 They had no story.

2 They were not writers.

3 There would be at least five hundred other applicants, who a. might have a story and b. were writers.

4 One of those applicants might be Hannah who most certainly had stories, a number of them.

5 A new truck was more than ten thousand dollars.

Chloe couldn’t help herself. She had to say something. If only she could learn to keep quiet, like Hannah, or Mason, things would be so much better in her life.

“Who are the junkyard boys?” she asked.

“We are. Blake. Mason. We’re ambling along, asking for no trouble, and suddenly—wham! Trouble comes.”

“Wham,” said Chloe.

“Blake’s right,” Mason said. “We’ve found some awful things.”

“Like what?”

“Dead rats.”

“Rats are good,” she said. “But then what? Someone not wanting dead rats in their house is hardly a story. It’s more like a truism.”

“We found some jewelry too once.”

“Jewelry is good. Then what?”

“Okay, maybe not jewelry, then. Something else.”

Chloe glanced at Hannah, walking on the side of the tracks, away from the three of them, barely listening. Blake jackhammered away at Chloe’s concrete skepticism. “They discover something awful. Something that changes everything. Mason, what can they find that is so monumental and terrible that it changes everything?”

“True love?” Chloe smiled.

“It’s not that kind of story, my dear Haiku,” Blake said with twinkling amusement. “This is a man’s story. No room in it for lurv, no matter how terrible and true. Right, cupcake?” Jumping off the rail, he jostled Hannah along the pebbles.

“Right,” she said.

Mason had new suggestions. “We found an old suitcase once. It was full of snakes. And once we found a live rabbit.”

“Yes,” Blake said. “He was delicious. But Chloe is right. We need a story, bro.” He smacked his forehead. “Got it. How about a human head in the trash?”

Chloe didn’t even blink this time. Almost as if she’d seen a human head in the trash before. “Nice,” she said. “And then?”

Blake shrugged. “Why do you care so much what happens next?” he asked.

She could tell he wasn’t taking it seriously. What the boys did for a living—that was work. Here, all they had to do was come up with a few words and place them in the sweet order that assured victory. Blake was convinced it was child’s play.

“You’re right, we’re all Philistines with our slavish devotion to plot,” Chloe said. “Be that as it may.”

“Yes. The writer drones on about what happens next and as soon as you the reader guess what’s coming, you either fall asleep or want to kill him.”

“So the trick is what? Never give the reader what she wants?”

Blake shook his head. “No. Give her what she didn’t even know she wanted.” He acted as if he knew what that was.

They turned for home. “They find a human head,” he went on, as he and Chloe ambled down the narrowing pine path leading home, Hannah and Mason behind them. A few hundred yards downhill, the dirt road tapered to one lane on which a truck or a car or people could pass—one at a time. “But not a skull.” Blake glanced back and widened his eyes at Hannah. “A head. That’s been recently separated from the body. It still has flesh on it. And they don’t know what to do. Do they investigate? Do they call the cops?”

“I think they should investigate,” Mason said, running up. “Investigations are fun.”

“There’s danger in it.”

“Danger is good,” Hannah said from behind. “Danger is story.”

No, Chloe wanted to correct her uncorrectable friend. Danger is danger. It’s not story.

Blake went on ruminating. “What if asking too many questions of the wrong people puts them in mortal danger?”

Chloe wondered if there was any other kind.

“Someone needs to shut them up. But who?”

“Obviously those who separated the head from the body.”

“But why would someone separate the head from the body?” Mason asked.

“I don’t know yet. But I really think we got us something here. Haiku, what do you think?”

“I say keep working on it.” Chloe used her most discouraging tone.

“Wait! I got it!” Blake exclaimed. “What if they find a suitcase? Yes, a mysterious suitcase! It’s blue. Oh my God, I got it. That’s my story.” Blake stopped and turned to the girls, beaming, his whole face flushed and thrilled. “The Blue Suitcase. What do you think?” He clapped. “It’s flipping awesome!”

Hannah smiled approvingly.

Chloe caught herself shrugging. “It’s a good title for a mystery,” she said. “But a title is not a story. What’s in the suitcase? Once you figure out that part, Blake, then you’ll have yourself a story.”

Blake laughed with characteristic lack of concern for details. He was a big picture guy. “James Bond always goes to a foreign country to solve mysteries and catch the bad guys,” he said. “Some fantastic exotic locale full of drink and women and danger.”

Chloe made a real effort not to rub her forehead. She had a lot of practice hiding exasperation from her mother, but this was on a different scale altogether. “James Bond is a government spy. He kills for money. He doesn’t rummage through the trash for severed heads.”

“Foreign country!” Mason exclaimed. “Blake, you’re a genius.”

Blake’s entire peacock tail opened up in kaleidoscope green.

“But wait,” Mason said. “You and I have never been to a foreign country.”

Blake blocked the girls’ way, smiling meaningfully at them. “Not yet,” he said.

The girls remained impassive. Only Chloe twitched slightly. Oh no! she thought. He doesn’t mean …

“We’ll go to Europe with you,” Blake said. “Mason’s right, I am a genius. The answer to our mysterious suitcase is in Europe. Oh man, this is going to be fantastic. And we’ve only been at it for five minutes. Imagine how good it’ll be when we spend a few days on it.” Blake thumped his flannel plaid chest. “We could win the book prize.”

“What book prize would that be, Blake?” Chloe said.

“I don’t know, Chloe. The prize they give the best book of the year. The Oscar for books. The Grammy, the Emmy.”

“The Pulitzer?”

“Whatever. That’s not the important part. To write something people will love, that’s the important part.”

Chloe leaned in to Hannah. “Did your crazy boyfriend just say he wants to go to Europe with us?”

“I’m sure that can’t be right,” Hannah, her expression frazzled, whispered back. “I’ll talk to him—”

Blake pulled Hannah away from Chloe. “Hannah, when are you two flying to Barcelona?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah replied. “Chloe, when are we flying?”

“I don’t know,” mumbled Chloe.

“Mason, that’s where we go, bro. Barcelona! Our story will climax there.” Blake laughed. The brothers high-fived and bumped shoulders.

“I thought you said it wasn’t that kind of story,” Chloe cut in.

“If it ends in Barcelona, Haiku, it’ll have to be a story for all seasons. Isn’t that where they have the running of the bulls?”

“Oh dear God. No. That’s Pamplona.”

“Wait,” Hannah said. “Blake, you’re not seriously thinking of coming with us?”

“We’re done thinking. We’re coming, baby!”

Mason looked shocked. “We’re going to Europe? You’re bullshitting me.”

“Mason, do I come up with the best ideas or what?”

Mason was at a loss for words.

“Blake …” Finally Hannah became actively engaged in the conversation. “Think about it for a minute. You’re not serious about writing a story, are you? The contest is open to all Maine residents. That’s a lot of competition. Just from our school, there’ll probably be at least a hundred entries. Everyone on our literary magazine is submitting a story.”

“Hannah, have you read the literary magazine?” said Blake, swinging his arms around, bouncing down the road. “It’s called Insanity’s Horse, for heaven’s sake.” He laughed. “Just for that title alone, those fools should be disqualified from participating. Do you remember the magazine’s April thought of the month? The pastiche of the pyramids implementing primal passion is a prolix representation of all phallic prose. I got your phallic prose right here. Yeah,” he said, merry and intense. “I’m not worried.”

How did this happen? One minute ticked by, and before it was up, Blake and Mason had climbed aboard the girls’ slow-chugging teenage dream.

Hannah stopped listening. She pulled on Chloe to slow down. “Now I really have to talk to you,” she said. “Come by before dinner?”

“Is it about Barcelona?” Chloe looked up into Hannah’s flat expression.

Hannah blinked. “No and yes. Do you have your passport yet?”

Chloe didn’t reply.

“Chloe! I told you—it takes two months to get a passport. Come on. Do you want to blow it?”

“Of course not. But that’s easy for you to say—you’re eighteen. I have to ask my parents to sign for my passport.”

“So?”

“Well, I’ll have to tell them I’m going first, won’t I?”

“I can’t believe you haven’t told them!”

“Yeah, well.” Chloe couldn’t believe a whole bunch of things.

Blake was in front of them, panting, eyes blazing, his body heaving. “So what do we have to do to get a passport?”

“Go to the post office,” Hannah said. “But take Chloe with you, because she doesn’t know how to get one either.”

“I know how. I just …”

Hannah batted her lashes. “Are you guys really going to come with us? Because don’t get our hopes up and then not come. That’d be mean.”

“I never disappoint you, pumpkin, do I?” Grabbing the slender Hannah, Blake pretended to dance with her and stepped on her feet. She yelped.

“Blake, you do know where Barcelona is, right?” Hannah said, her arms around his neck. “In Spain. And you know where Spain is, right? In Europe. As in—on another continent. As in, you need not just a passport, which costs upward of a hundred bucks, but also a plane ticket, and train tickets, and maybe, oh, I don’t know—some lodging and food money.”

Mason began to look doubtful, but Blake shrugged with gleeful indifference. “You know what they say, babycakes.” He squeezed her. “You gotta spend money to make money. It’s like the ten grand I’m getting for my story. We can’t start our own business till we win this thing. And we can’t win this thing till we do this other thing.”

“This other thing,” said Chloe, “meaning horn in on my lifelong dream?”

“Exactly. Mase, let’s jet. We gotta go get ourselves some passports. We have no time to lose.” As they sped up, their boots kicked up dust in a bee cloud. “Where’s this post office, anyway?” Blake called back.

“Are you joking? You’ve never been to the Fryeburg post office?”

Hannah poked Chloe. “You’ve never been there either, missy.”

Chloe poked Hannah back. “Yes, I have, stop it.”

Blake pulled on his brother. “Let’s hoof, bro. Should we pick you up, Chloe?” The Hauls lived three houses up from Chloe, around the pond through the scraggly pines and birches.

“Yeah, Chloe,” Hannah said, sticking a finger into Chloe’s back. “Should they pick you up to go get your passport?”

“It’s okay,” said Chloe, swatting Hannah’s fingers away. “I’ll have my mom take me.”

The girls gazed after their young men, and then resumed walking. Hannah shook her head—in distress? In wonderment? Chloe couldn’t tell. “I guess I’ll be going to Spain with my boyfriend and your boyfriend, but not with you.”

“Har-de-har-har.”

“You think I’m being funny? You can’t start your adult life being such a chicken, Chloe. What are you afraid of? Be more like me. I’m not afraid of anything.” She said it as if she didn’t mean it.

But all Chloe heard was be more like me. Ain’t that a kick in the teeth, she thought, stiffening. They were almost at the clearing in front of Chloe’s green bungalow. Hannah slowed down, as if she wanted to linger, but Chloe sped up as if that was the last thing she wanted. “I have to be diplomatic,” she said. “I need their permission to go. I can’t just present them with an I’m-going-to-Europe vaudeville routine.”

“If you don’t start acting like an adult, why should they treat you like one?”

How much did Chloe not want to talk about it. It wasn’t that Hannah was wrong. It was that Hannah always said obvious things in such a way that made Chloe not only think her friend was wrong, but that she wanted her friend to be wrong.

“I’ll talk to them tonight,” she said, hurrying across her pine needle clearing.

“I wouldn’t tell them about Mason and Blake just yet.”

“Ya think?”

Since Mrs. Haul and Lang went shopping on Fridays, Chloe had a feeling that her silence on the subject might be short-lived.

“Okay,” Hannah said, “but start slow. Don’t make your mother go all Chinese on you. You always make her nuts. First dangle our trip, then wait. The boys might be pie in the sky anyway. Where are they going to get the money from? It’ll pass, you’ll see.”

Chloe said nothing. Clearly Hannah had no idea who her boyfriend was. There was no talking Blake out of anything. Short fiction indeed! And as if to prove Chloe’s point, Janice Haul’s Subaru came charging toward them from around the trees, Blake rolling down his window, slowing down, honking.

“We’re off to get our passports!” he yelled. “See ya!”

Chloe turned to Hannah. “You were saying?”

“All right, fine. But don’t tell your mom about them yet.”

“What did you want to talk to me about?” Chloe asked. Only a flimsy screen door separated Chloe’s mother’s ears from Hannah’s troubles.

Hannah waved her off. “Just you wait,” she said, all doom and gloom.

2
Sweet Potato

“I’M IN THE KITCHEN,” HER MOTHER CALLED OUT AS SOON as Chloe opened the screen door. A statement of delightful irony since they lived in a winterized cabin that was one room entire, if one didn’t count, which Chloe didn’t, the bathroom, the two small bedrooms and the open attic lost where Chloe slept.

I’m in the kitchen, Lang said, because this month she was baking. Last winter, her mother was scrapbooking so every day, when Chloe came home, she would hear: I’m in the dining room.

The previous fall, her mother decided to become a seamstress and told Chloe that from now on she was sewing all of her daughter’s clothes, in the craft room.

When she was tracing out the family tree on her new Christmas-present software, Lang was in the computer room.

During the summers, Lang said nothing, because she was outside, fishing and tending her vegetable garden, voluminous enough to supply tomatoes to all eight homes around their part of the lake. Bushels of zucchini and cucumbers went with Chloe’s dad to work.

Chloe’s mother Lang Devine, née Lang Thia of Chinese descent from Red River, North Dakota, reinvented herself constantly into something new. She had wanted to be a dancer when she was young, but then she met Jimmy and wanted to be a wife. After many years as a wife, she wanted to be a mother. And after many years as a mother of one, she wanted to be a mother of two.

Jimmy’s favorite, he said, was when Lang took up tap dancing. He built her a wooden platform; she bought herself a pair of black Capezios size 5, some CDs and taught herself how to tap dance. That was noisy.

And not as delicious as baking, which was the current phase, and Chloe’s favorite after gardening. Jimmy Devine liked it, too, but groused that he was gaining two pounds a week because of Lang’s buttery hobby. Chloe thought her dad might teasingly mention the extra pounds Lang herself had put on around her five-foot frame, now that she wasn’t tap dancing. But no. Just last week, Jimmy said as he dug into Lang’s cream puffs (made with half-and-half, not milk, by the way), “Sweet potato, how do you bake so much and yet stay so thin?”

And Chloe’s mother had tittered!

How to explain to both her parents that it was unseemly for a grown woman of advancing years, married for nearly thirty, to titter when her husband paid her a half-hearted compliment by calling her the name of a red starchy root vegetable?

This afternoon Chloe walked in slowly, set down her school bag, pulled off her boots, and walked down the short corridor, past her parents’ bedroom, past the bedroom that no one ever went into anymore, past the bathroom, into the open area to put her lunchbox on the kitchen counter where it would be cleaned and prepped for tomorrow. Something smelled heavenly. Chloe didn’t want to admit it, because she didn’t want to encourage her mother in any way. What her mother needed was a tamping down of enthusiasm, not a fanning of the fire. Her mother and Blake shared that in common.

“Doesn’t that smell divine?” Lang giggled, turned around, and with floury hands, patted Chloe on both cheeks. “I only make divine things for my divine girl.” One of the few things Chloe tolerated about her mother was that she was short, making even Chloe seem tall by comparison.

Chloe brushed the white powder off her face. “Whatchya makin’?”

“Linzer tarts.”

“Doesn’t smell like Linzer tarts.” Chloe glanced inside one of the pots on the stove.

“Raspberry jam. I made it from scratch this afternoon for the tarts. It’s still warm. You want to try?”

Chloe did want to try, so much. “No, thank you,” she said. “I’m full.”

“Full from lunch four hours ago?”

Lang got out some orange juice, a yoghurt, unboxed some Wheat Thins, opened some cheddar cheese, washed a bowl of blueberries, and set it all in front of Chloe sitting glumly at the table. She brought the long wooden spoon half-filled with warm jam to Chloe’s face. Chloe tasted it. She had to admit it was so good. But she only admitted it to herself. She wouldn’t admit it to her overeager mother. “What’s for dinner?”

“I’m thinking ratatouille.”

“What?”

“You’ll see. It’s a vegetable stew, I think. But it could be a condiment.” She chuckled. Honestly, why did Chloe have to be the only serious one in her house?

“Dad needs meat.”

“Yes, don’t worry, we’ll feed the carnivore some pork chops. I found a spicy new recipe. With cumin. How was school?”

Chloe desperately needed to talk to her mother. She didn’t know where to start. That she didn’t know how to start was more vital. She tried not to be irritated today by her mother’s earnest round face, unmade-up and open, high cheekbones, red mouth, smiling slanting eyes, affectionate gaze, her short black hair straw straight like Chloe’s. Tell me everything, her mother’s welcome expression said. We will deal with everything together. Chloe tried hard not to sigh, not to look away, not to wish however fleetingly for Hannah’s mother, the thin, pinched, absent-minded and largely absent Terri Gramm. “School’s good,” she said.

That’s it. School’s good. Nothing else. Open book, look down into food, drink the OJ, don’t look up, don’t speak. Soon enough, the hobby called. Jam would have to be cooled, the Linzer tarted, the ratatouille stewed.

Trouble was, today Chloe needed to talk to her mother. Or at least begin to try to talk to her. She needed a passport. Otherwise all her little dreams were just vapor. She had kept her dreams deliberately small, thinking they might be easier to realize, but now feared she hadn’t kept them small enough.

“Are you going to write a story too?” her mother said. “You should. Mrs. Mencken told me about the Acadia prize. Ten thousand dollars is amazing. I bet Hannah is going to write one. She fancies herself to be good at anything. You will too, of course. Right?”

Now who wouldn’t be exasperated? What kind of a mother knew about things that happened that day in fourth period English, before her child even had a chance to open her mouth? Chloe managed to contain her agitation. After all, her mother had unwittingly offered her the opening she needed.

“You discussed it with Hannah and your boys?”

“Not necessarily,” Chloe replied. Disgusted is what she was. “Why would you say that?”

“Because you took nearly forty-five minutes to walk home from the bus. It usually takes you fifteen. What else are you doing if not discussing the Acadia Award for Short Fiction?”

Again, easy to suppress a giant sigh? Chloe didn’t think so. She sighed giantly. “I’m not going to do it, Mom. I’ve got nothing to say. What am I going to write about?”

Lang stared at Chloe calmly. For a moment the mother and daughter didn’t speak, and in the silence the ominous shadows of hollowed-out fangs essential for a story were abundantly obvious.

“I mean,” Chloe hurriedly continued, “perhaps I could write about Kilkenny. But I can’t, can I? Because I didn’t go. Maybe you can write that story. I don’t think there’s an age limit on entrants.”

When Chloe was eleven, her parents had gone to Ireland without her. They said it was for a funeral. Pfft. Their trip formed the foundation of much, if not all, of the resentment of Chloe’s teenage years. A blown-up photo in a heavy gold leaf frame of the Castlecomer glens hung prominently in the hallway.

Lang continued to stare calmly at Chloe.

“You don’t need Kilkenny to write a story,” Lang said. “There are other things. Or, you make it up. That’s why they call it fiction.”

“Make it up from what? I’m going to make up a story about something so dramatic that it will win first prize?”

“Why not? Blake is.”

How did her mom know this!

“I’ve seen nothing. But Blake has seen rats and—” She stopped herself from saying used condoms.

“You have an imagination, don’t you?”

“No, none. I need a story, Mom. Not musings about what it’s like to live on a puddle lake in Maine.”

“Puddle lake? Have you glimpsed the stunning beauty outside your own windows?”

In the afternoons, the glistening lake, blooming willows and birches trimming the shoreline, the railroad rising on the embankment did occasionally shine with the scarlet colors of life. That wasn’t the point.

“I can’t write about skiing or bowling, or learning to drive,” Chloe continued. “I need something substantial. And I have nothing.” Why couldn’t she talk about herself without allowing a whiff of self-pity to waft through her smallest words? The one ashen tragedy in their life she could never write about. And Lang knew that. So why push it? Besides, her mother had once informed her that the Devine women were too short to be tragic figures. “We can be stoics, but not tragics,” Lang had said a few years ago, when it seemed to everyone else that the very opposite was the only thing true. “Make it up, darling,” Lang repeated, unperturbed by her daughter’s tone. “You’re a very good writer.”

“Mom, I don’t want to be a writer.”

“Neither does Blake. Yet look at him.”

Chloe watched her mother walk to the printer in the computer room behind the sofa and peel off several sheets of paper. Lang slapped the rules of entry for the Acadia contest on the table.

“You have five months to come up with a story and write it. It must be original. It must be fiction. And after it wins, it will be published by the University of Maine Press. Properly published! In book form and everything. That’s very exciting, isn’t it?”

“Did you not hear me?”

“No. By the way, I got you the pens you wanted.” Lang produced three packages of blue pens, gel, ballpoint, and fountain, and laid them in front of Chloe.

“I also took the liberty of getting you a notebook. Several different kinds to choose from. I thought you might need one if you’re going to write a story that’s going to win first prize. The Moleskine is very good. Has soft paper. But you try them all.”

Chloe stared at the pens, at the four notebooks. Had she actually mentioned that she needed a pen? One blue pen!

“Mom, listen to me.”

Lang sat down, elbows on the table, staring at Chloe with complete attention. She looked so pleased to be told to do what she had already been doing.

“I want to write something, I do. I just don’t think I have … look, here’s what we were thinking.”

“Who’s we?”

“The four of us.”

“The four of you were thinking all at once?”

“Well, discussing.”

“That’s better. It’s always good to be precise if you’re thinking of becoming a writer.”

“Which I’m not, so.”

“What are you four up to now? Let’s hear it.”

“We’re thinking of going to Europe.”

Lang stayed neutral. She didn’t blanch, she barely blinked. No, she did blink. Slowly, steadily, as if she was about to say …

“Are you crazy?”

There it was. “First listen, then judge. Can you do that?”

“No.”

“Mom. You just said you wanted me to write.”

“You have to go to Europe to write? Did Flannery O’Connor go to Europe? Did Eudora Welty? Did Truman Capote?”

“Actually, he did, yes.”

“When he wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms, his first novel, he’d been to Europe?”

“I don’t know. We’re getting off topic, Mom.”

“Au contraire. We are very much on topic.”

“Mason and Blake need to do research.”

“So they’re going to Europe?”

Chloe made a real effort not to facepalm, a real, true, Herculean, McDonald’s supersize-sandwich effort not to facepalm, because there were few things her mother hated more than this brazen gesture of exasperation and frustration.

“Hannah and I have been talking about the trip for a while.”

“I thought you just said you wanted to go for Blake and Mason? Make up your mind, child. Either you thought of it on the railroad tracks, or you’ve been planning it for years.”

“How do you know we were on the tracks?”

“I saw you.” Lang pointed out the window. “Right across the lake.”

Both things were true. Chloe and Hannah had been dreaming of going for years, but Blake and Mason just thought of it today. Lang sat and watched her daughter like a bird watching the world. One never knew what the Langbird was thinking until she sang.

“Isn’t going away to college enough for you?” Lang said quietly.

Chloe clasped her hands. She didn’t want to look into her mother’s face. She knew how hard it must have been for her parents to let her go away to school. “I’ve been dreaming of Europe since I was little,” she said, almost whispered. “Way before college.”

“Sometimes circumstances change, and we have to dream a different dream,” said Lang. There was only a breath after that, and no change in expression to reflect the colossal wreck from which life had had to be recomposed, rebuilt from the ashes, Capezio shoe by Linzer tart. “College away is a big step, not to mention an enormous expense, even with the scholarship they’re giving you.”

“I know, Mom. Exactly. And then work and study and more work and study, and when else could I ever do it?”

“Oh, I don’t know, let’s see, how about—four years from now? Or never. Either way is good with me.”

“That’s what I want for my graduation present,” Chloe declared boldly. “A trip to Europe. You went to Europe.”

“It was for a funeral!”

“So what.”

“Graduation present. Really. I thought you wanted a laptop.”

“I’ll use our old one. I’ll take the desktop.”

“You certainly will not. All my family-tree files are on it.”

“I thought you were baking now? Oh, and yes, the files are permanently embedded in that one desktop computer. You’re right. They can never be moved.”

“Do you know what happens after you make a choice to be sarcastic to the woman who gave you life?”

Chloe softened her tone. She knew that talking to her parents about anything was a fifteen-part process that would begin with an idea being promptly rejected and then followed up by a string of days during which her mother enumerated in Tolstoyan prose why whatever it was Chloe wanted was the worst idea. After a War and Peace-length volume on why they couldn’t get a dog, or a tattoo, or a third earring, or go to Europe, the real decision would be handed down. She didn’t get a tattoo. Or a dog. Or a third earring. What was happening here was just preface. The real meat of her mother’s argument was still to come.

But this time Chloe wanted a different resolution. This time she wanted her way, not Lang’s way. “Mom, what’s the big deal? I’ll be eighteen when we go.” When, not if. What a clever play on words! What a clever girl.

“Yes, because that solves all the problems. And don’t use the word when with me, young lady.”

Ahh! “What problems? There are no problems. We want to go to Europe for a few weeks. We’ll walk around, visit beautiful churches, eat delicious food, go to the beach, experience things we’ve never experienced before—”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“And then come home,” Chloe continued, “and Blake will write a beautiful story that will win first prize.”

“The boy has many skills. Do you think writing is one of them?”

“He thinks he does and that’s all that matters.” Chloe was defiant, but she didn’t have the answers. To her friends, she was usually the person her mother was being to her right now. The devil’s advocate, the sucker of joy. There were a thousand reasons why everything Blake and Mason wanted to do was a terrible idea. Oh God. Had Chloe already turned into her mother at seventeen? Facepalm!

“And by the way,” Lang said, “Europe is a big place. It’s not Rhode Island. Or Acadia National Park. Where in Europe were you four thinking of visiting? You mentioned church and beach. That could be anywhere.”

“Barcelona.”

Her mother groaned. “Barcelona. Really. That’s your idea. Of all the places, that’s where you want to go?”

“We’ve never been to Spain. And it’s on the water.”

“So is Maine. And you’ve never been to Belgium either.”

“Who wants to go to Belgium? What kind of story can one possibly write about Belgium? Or Maine?”

Lang shook her head. “There is so much you don’t know.”

“That’s why I want to go to Europe. So I can find out.”

“You’re going to learn about life lying on a filthy beach? Okay, riddle me this,” Lang said. “Where do you plan to sleep?”

“What do you mean?”

“Am I not being clear? You’re planning to go with your boyfriend, your best friend and her boyfriend. Where are the four of you going to sleep in this Barcelona?”

Chloe tried not to stammer. “We haven’t thought about it.”

“Haven’t you.” It was not a question.

“Probably a youth hostel or somewhere like that.”

“So in a dorm with fifty strangers all using the same bathroom facilities, if there are any?”

“We don’t care about that. We are young, Mom. We’re not like you. We don’t care about creature comforts. Where we sleep. What we eat. What we wear. It’s all fine. So it’s not the Four Seasons. So what? We’ll be in Europe. We’ll buy a student Eurail pass for a few hundred bucks, sleep on trains if we have to, to save money.”

“Why would you need to do that?” Lang’s already narrow dark eyes narrowed and darkened further. “You just said you were going to Barcelona. Why would you need to sleep on trains?”

“In case we wanted to see Madrid. Or maybe Paris.” That was Hannah’s idea. Hannah, the Toulouse-Lautrec artiste.

“Paris.”

“Yes, Paris. Isn’t France next to Spain?”

Her mother folded her hands together. “Chloe, I tell you what. Go away and think carefully about all the questions I’m going to ask you next time you sit down and say, Mom, I want to go to Barcelona. Everything I’m going to ask you, ask yourself, find an answer, and come prepared.”

“Like what?”

“Nope. That’s not how it works. You figure out the solutions to the problems. Oh, and by the way, one of those problems is telling your father. Let’s see how you surmount that.”

Chloe became deflated. “I thought maybe you could tell him.”

“That’s likely.”

“Don’t be sarcastic, Mom.”

“I’m not being sarcastic. I’m being snide. You know I’m actually going to tell him as soon as he walks in the door.”

“Perhaps he’ll be more reasonable than you,” Chloe said. “Maybe Dad remembers what it’s like to be young. Oh, wait, I forgot, you can’t remember, because you were born old. Born knowing you’d have a kid someday whose dreams you’d spend your entire life harpooning.”

“I’m harpooning your dream of going to Barcelona?” said Lang. “The dream I didn’t know you had until five minutes ago?” She raised her hand before Chloe could protest, defend, explain, justify. “Where are you going to sleep, Chloe? Why don’t you first work on giving your father the answer to that pesky question. Because it’ll be the first thing he’ll ask. Then worry about everything else.”

Her parents didn’t yell, they didn’t punish. They were simply hyperaware of every single thing Chloe said and did. She got a new ribbon at the high school book fair? They knew. She once almost failed a biology test? They knew. She wore black eyeliner? Oh, they knew. She and Mason danced too close at one Friday night canteen? How they knew. They had no life except to live vicariously through hers. And the only thing that was expected of her, aside from not flunking out of school, was not to let down half a billion Chinese mothers by going to a Barcelona beach to have unfettered sex with her boyfriend.

“Going to Barcelona is also an education, Mom,” Chloe muttered. She really didn’t want to face her dad’s questions. What was she supposed to say? We’re going to get two rooms, and the girls will stay in one room, and the boys in the other? What kind of naïve fool for a parent would believe that?

“Yes, an education in boys,” said Lang. “What are you going to tell us, that you’ll get two rooms and you and Hannah will stay in one and the boys in the other?”

There you go. Didn’t even have to say a word.

“Your plan,” Lang continued, “is to rove around Europe for a month with your boyfriend on your hard-earned college savings. This is something you’re seriously proposing to your father and me?”

Dad is not here, Chloe wanted to say. She didn’t know of whom she was more afraid. Dad never really liked Mason, that gentle kid. She didn’t know why. Everyone loved him. “We could go to Belgium, too, if you want.”

“Are you weak in the head? Why would I want this?”

“You mentioned Belgium. I could bring you back some chocolates.”

“Your father gets me a Whitman’s Sampler every Valentine’s Day. That’s enough for me.”

“Belgium is safe.”

“Is Mason safe?”

“Hannah will be with me. She’s nearly a year older. She’ll protect me.”

“Chloe,” said her mother, “sometimes you say the funniest things. That girl couldn’t protect a squirrel. She can’t protect herself. I trust Mason more than I trust Hannah.”

“See?”

“More, which is to say nothing. How much is two times zero? Still zero, child.” She raised her hand before Chloe could come back with a wisecrack. “Enough. I have to slap these Linzers together and then get dinner on. Your father will be home soon. Go to the music room and practice.”

“I’m going to be eighteen, Mom,” Chloe repeated lamely.

“Yes, and I’m going to be forty-seven. And your father forty-nine. I’m glad we established how old we are. Now what?”

“I’m old enough to make my own choices,” said Chloe, hoping her mother wouldn’t laugh at her.

To Lang’s credit, she didn’t. “Can you choose right now to go play a musical instrument,” she said. “Piano or violin. Pick one. Practice thirty minutes.”

“Hannah wants to talk to me before dinner.”

“Well, then, you’d better jump to it,” said Lang, her back turned, an icing sugar shaker in her hands. “What Hannah wants, Hannah gets.”

3
The Perils of College Interviews

CHLOE SPRINTED FROM HER HOUSE ACROSS THE FLOWERBEDS and brush to Hannah’s next door.

Since the divorce five years ago, Hannah’s mother had been involved with revolving boyfriends, and consequently their yard never got cleaned up. “Why can’t she do it herself?” Lang would demand. Blake and Mason offered every month to help, but Terri didn’t want to pay them to do it. And she didn’t want them to do it for free because that was asking men for a favor. So she lived surrounded by unkempt backwoods, in wild contrast to Chloe’s parents’ approach to their house and their rural life. Lang allocated part of every day to weeding, mowing, cleaning, planting, raking, leafing, clearing, maintaining. The birches and pines were trimmed as if giraffes had gotten to them, and all the pine cones were swept up and placed in tall ornamental wicker baskets, and even the loose pebbles were picked up and arranged around the flowerbeds and bird houses and vegetable gardens. It was quite telling that Terri and Lang lived next door to each other for almost twenty years and yet didn’t know each other’s birthdays. Lang never said a thing, and kept Jimmy from saying anything, but Chloe could tell by her father’s critical expression when he spoke of “that family” that he looked forward to the day Hannah might become a friend of the past. There are two kinds of people in the world, Jimmy Devine said. Those who try to make everything they come in contact with more beautiful—and then there is Terri Gramm.

Before Chloe knocked, she stopped by the dock and stared out onto the lake, the railroad across it, the bands of violet mackerel sky. She imagined a lover’s kiss in the Mediterranean breeze, the mosaics of streets, parades down the boulevards, music, ancient stones, and evening meals. Beaches, heat, flamenco, bagpipes. Passion, life, noise. Everything that here was not. She imagined herself, fire, flowing dresses, abundant cleavage, no fear. Everything that here she was not. Her heart aching, she knocked on Hannah’s porch door.

Hannah’s mother was on the couch watching Wheel of Fortune.

“Hello, Mrs. Gramm.”

“Hi, honey.” Terri didn’t turn her head to Chloe. “Are you staying for dinner?”

“No, my mom—”

“I’m joking. We got nothing anyway.”

Hannah pulled Chloe into her bedroom and slammed the door.

“Did she say no?”

“Of course she said no.”

“But was it no, we’ll see, or was it no like never?”

“It was no like never.”

“But then she started asking you all kinds of questions?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s yes. They never ask anything unless it’ll be yes eventually. Give her a week to think about it. She has to talk to your dad.”

“You think I’ll have a better chance with him?”

“No. But he might give you money.”

“For Barcelona?”

“We’ll figure it out. We have bigger problems right now.”

“Bigger than my mom saying no?”

“Yes.” Hannah was biting her nails. Perfect Hannah with her perfect teeth was biting to the nubs her ugly nails at the end of her perfect long fingers. “How likely is it, do you think, that Blake and Mason are actually going to go?”

“A hundred percent.” Chloe pulled her friend’s twitchy hand out of her mouth. “Stop doing that. Don’t you know what Blake is like?”

Hannah didn’t reply. She was too busy bloodying the tips of her fingers.

Chloe plopped down on Hannah’s lavender bed. The girl turned up her music which was already plenty loud. She did it so her mother couldn’t hear her, but the result was that Chloe couldn’t hear her either. Hannah had a barely audible soprano, like a low hum, and over the high treble strands of Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” she was nearly impossible to make out.

She lay on her bed next to Chloe. “Chloe-bear, I’m in trouble.”

“What?”

“I have to break up with him and I don’t know how to do it.”

“With Blake?” Chloe sat up. She was horrified.

“No, with Martyn.”

“Who?”

“Stop it. Be serious.”

Chloe stopped it. How to tell Hannah that she was serious? Who the heck was Martyn? She hoped her pitiable ignorance didn’t show on her face. She scrunched it up knowingly, trussed her eyebrows, nodded. “Why, um, do you have to break up with him?”

“He was going to give me money to go to Barcelona, because he knows I don’t have enough, but if Blake is going, he won’t give me any money.”

Chloe blindly navigated the maze before her, hands out in front. “So don’t tell him Blake is going.” Who the hell was Martyn?!

“Except … he was going to meet us in Barcelona for a few days.”

Chloe weighed her words. “Martyn was going to meet us in Barcelona for a few days?” As if repetition would make Hannah’s words make sense.

“I didn’t want him to, Chloe, believe me, but I don’t have enough money to go, and I thought, what’s a couple of days, when we’re going to be there two weeks, right?”

“Martyn was going to meet us in Barcelona.”

“Don’t be mad. I was going to tell you he was coming. I was just waiting for the right time. Please don’t be mad.” Hannah briefly leaned her head into Chloe’s head, and then clapped her hands business-like. “No, that’s it. I’m going to end it. It’s for the best,” she said. “He is getting too serious, anyway. We need to break up, not go on vacation.”

“Martyn was going to meet us in Barcelona.” Chloe couldn’t get past this one point.

“He doesn’t want me to go without him. He’s afraid I’m going to meet someone, have a fling. He is intensely jealous.”

“Martyn is jealous.”

“Yes, so jealous.”

“Um, does Martyn know you have a boyfriend? Maybe he can be jealous of him.” Poor Blake.

“He’s not worried about him.”

“Well, you’re not, why should he be? So this Martyn is afraid you’ll have a fling in Europe with someone other than your boyfriend?” Chloe opened her hands. “What kind of girl does he think you are?”

“Can you please, please be serious? I know I need to break up with him. But then where do I get the money to go?” She wrung her hands, twisted her sore and bitten fingers. The usually unruffled Hannah looked ruffled.

Chloe was afraid to ask the follow-up question. There were so many questions, she couldn’t sort out their order of priority. She was thinking of Barcelona. But she was also thinking about Blake. “Hannah, if you have someone else, why do you string Blake along? Why don’t you break it off with him, and do what you want?”

“Don’t talk nonsense, Chloe,” Hannah said. “Did you not hear me just now when I said I was going to end it with Martyn?”

Chloe heard all right. “Do you even still want to go to Barcelona?”

“More than anything.”

“With Blake?”

“I’d prefer to go with just you.” Hannah pulled Chloe in for a hug. “Like we planned. Do you think we can talk Blake out of going?”

Chloe shrugged. “Perhaps you can dissuade him by telling him if he goes, then your secret lover won’t give you any money for Europe.”

In a humph Hannah turned her back to Chloe.

“I thought you had money,” Chloe said quietly. “I thought we were both saving.”

“We were. We are. But Chloe, I’m not you. I can’t walk around in the same extra-large T-shirt. I need spring clothes, I need summer clothes.”

“What do you want, a new skirt or Barcelona?”

“Both.”

“You don’t have money for both. Pick.”

“Both!”

Hannah’s back curved into a ball.

Chloe sighed, kneading her comforting palm between Hannah’s shoulder blades. “Who’s this Martyn anyway?”

“Don’t joke.”

“I mean”—Chloe cleared her throat—“how come he has money to burn?”

“He’s a professor. He’s got plenty of money.”

Martyn, Martyn, Martyn. Chloe tried to remember the first names of their teachers at the Academy. In any case, Hannah said professor, not teacher. Jumping up, Hannah started to pace and talk, began to tell Chloe things she couldn’t hear. It occurred to her that perhaps this was the reason she didn’t know about Martyn. Hannah told her, but Metallica was playing and through the strands of living life their way, Chloe had missed it.

Hannah grabbed Chloe’s hands. “What am I going to do? It’ll crush him.”

“Do you want to break up with him?”

“I have to. He’s become way too emotionally involved with me.”

“What about Blake?”

“Will you forget Blake! I have a real problem and you bringing him up every five seconds is not helping me.”

Chloe tried to regroup, find something else to say that sounded less hectory. “Um, how long has the Martyn thing been going on?”

“October.”

“Last October?”

“Yes, since my college interview. Chloe, why are you being so obtuse? Is this deliberate? Is this your way of judging me? You’re making it hard to talk to you.”

Now Chloe remembered. She had driven Hannah to Bangor for her University of Maine admission interview. Chloe had been accepted without an interview so she waited outside while Hannah went in. Hannah walked out with a man, who shook her hand or, rather, took her hand and held it. Hannah introduced Chloe to a very tall, grandfatherly gentleman, soft spoken and modest in manner. Surely that wasn’t Martyn?

Chloe thought no more about it, except in January when Hannah asked to be driven to Bangor again because the admissions office needed to go over a couple of things.

That couldn’t be the man Hannah needed to break up with. Chloe had it wrong. It couldn’t be him because he was …

“Hannah, I’m sorry, but how old is Martyn?”

Hannah studied the lilac bedspread as if the answer was written on her sheets like a cheat sheet. “Sixty-two,” she said.

Chloe jumped off the bed.

“Sit down. What are you getting all riled up about?”

“Hannah!” Chloe couldn’t sit. She could barely focus on Hannah’s aggrieved face. “Please tell me you’re not involved with a man forty years older than you. Please.” Was Chloe the only one who thought this was gross?

“Okay,” Hannah said. Metallica segued into Nirvana. Come as you are. As a friend. “Forty-four years,” she corrected Chloe.

Come as you are.

Chloe didn’t know why she should feel so affected by this. Hannah on the other hand was flushed, blinking rapidly, breathing through her mouth, as if she was catching the strands of the plot on her tongue and was about to jump on her computer and write a story for the ages. “He’s very much in love with me,” she said musically. “I didn’t realize he would fall so deep. He’s a widower and has been very lonely. At first he told me it was just for company. He knew we couldn’t last. He’s the one who told me it wouldn’t last!”

“But you’ve only seen him the few times I’ve driven you to Bangor,” Chloe said dumbly. “Right? I mean …”

“Don’t be naïve. We’ve been meeting every Tuesday at the Silver Pines Motor Court. And some Saturdays. He finishes teaching early on Tuesdays.”

Chloe’s expression must have been a sight.

“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” Hannah said. “I didn’t want to be judged, and I was afraid you’d spill the beans to Mason, and then Blake would find out.”

Where had Chloe been that she hadn’t noticed Hannah’s twice-weekly disappearance? What did Hannah tell Blake about her regularly scheduled absence from their already convoluted life? How could he not know? Chloe had been busy squirreling away her own secrets from Hannah, and perhaps was grateful for a few days a week when she didn’t have to look away every time Hannah waxed about the University of Maine they would both be attending in the fall. But what was Blake’s excuse?

Tonight Chloe had nothing to say about Hannah’s dilemma. She remained stuck on the geezer’s age. He was thirteen years older than her father! Yet Hannah seemed unconcerned with this most startling detail: that she was sleeping with Cain and Abel’s uncle. Hannah sighed as if in a romance novel. “It’s extremely flattering to be loved like that,” she said. “So intensely. Oh Chloe! Do you know what it’s like to be loved so intensely?”

“Oh, sure.” Chloe stared into her hands as if they loved her intensely. “Quite a situation you’ve gotten yourself into, girlfriend,” she said.

“Don’t you think I know that?” For a moment, Hannah looked ready to cry. Yet Chloe knew that to be false, for Hannah didn’t cry. She only appeared to look to be ready to cry.

“I gotta go,” Chloe said, rising. “Hey, look on the bright side. My parents probably won’t let me go anyway.”

“How is that the bright side?” said Hannah. “We’ve been dreaming of Barcelona since we were eleven.”

4
Paleo Flood at Red River

IT WAS DARK OUTSIDE AND HER FATHER’S BLACK DODGE Durango was parked in the open clearing by the time Chloe left Hannah’s and made her way through the brambles between the two properties.

It was a warm evening. Through the open window she could hear her mother’s soft voice and her father’s booming one. Chloe slowed down. Treading quietly over the pine needles that crunched under her feet, she inched up to the screened-in window in the living room.

“It’s out of the question.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Why would she want to go there?”

“She says because she hasn’t been.”

“What kind of a reason is that?”

“She says because we went to Ireland without her.”

“If I hear one more word about Ireland!”

“Shh. I know.”

“I hope you were forceful, Mother. I hope you said no.”

“I was forceful. I said no.”

“But what?”

“But nothing.”

“No, I can see by your face it’s something. What?”

“She’s insisting.”

“So? We’re going to allow the child to make the decisions?”

“She said something about turning eighteen.”

“Oh, so she’s going to play that card!”

“That’s what I said.”

“Why does she really want to go?”

“I don’t know, Jimmy.”

“What’s in Barcelona?”

“Nothing. It’s not Fryeburg, not Brownfield, not Maine.”

“So why doesn’t she go to Canada? We’ll drive her to Montreal. It’s only a few hours away. In another country. We’ll leave her and Hannah there, then pick them up a few days later.”

“Yeah. Well. I haven’t told you the half of it.”

There was rustling, cooing, small giggles. “You haven’t heard my half of it, sweet potato. It’ll give you and me a chance to stay in a hotel. Like newlyweds.”

“Jimmy, don’t be bad.”

More rustling. Even some grunting.

“Jimmy, come on …”

Sweet God. Chloe couldn’t even eavesdrop on her parents’ conversation about her without it becoming a study in her own mortification.

“But seriously,” her father said. The cooing had stopped, thank God. “We can’t let her go.”

“I agree. How do we stop her?”

“We’ll just tell her she can’t go.”

“I look forward to our spicy pork chops tonight over which you tell her.”

“I’ve never liked that Hannah. Why couldn’t that no-good father of hers have gotten custody instead?”

“I think the answer is built into your very question.”

“That Terri is a piece of work. Doesn’t she know what’s going on with her own kids? I hear Jason is always in trouble up in Portland. By the way, the raccoons got to her garbage again.”

“I saw. I smelled.”

“Did you talk to her about cleaning it up? Or am I going to have to?”

“She told me this morning the animals have to eat, too.”

“I’m going to shoot them next time I hear them near her cans. They’re a rabid nuisance.”

“Jimmy, carry the potatoes. She better come home soon. Dinner is ready.”

“Should I go get her? Did you drive her?”

“No, I didn’t drive her to Hannah’s house. It’s forty yards away.”

There was silence. “I didn’t drive her, Jimmy. She’s fine. She’s next door.” Chloe heard the pot being placed on the table.

“So what are we going to do?”

“Talk some sense into her. She listens to you. You’re her father.”

“If she listened to me, she’d never ask for something so stupid.”

“It’s not stupid, Jimmy, it’s just kids being kids.”

“I never did nothing like that.”

“Okay. We did some stuff too.”

“Not like that.”

“Worse. We were young, too.”

“Hmm.”

“You remember Pembina? The paleo flood in the Red River in ’77? All right, Mr. Comedian. I know you remember. We were so bad. We didn’t need to go to Barcelona.”

“We never needed to go anywhere, sweet potato.”

“Get the drinks. I’ll go get her.”

Pembina was where Lang was from. Pembina, North Dakota, less than two miles south of the Canadian border. The Red River is slow and small. It doesn’t have the energy to cut a gorge. It meanders through the silty bottomlands. Yet every few years it floods catastrophically through the marsh at its delta. It causes immense destruction. In 1977, the river flooded, and the National Guard was called in to help the locals cope. Jimmy Devine, National Guard, met Lang Thia, whose father was a prominent local businessman who made hearing aids.

Her mother didn’t need a hearing aid. She came to the window near which Chloe was hiding and said into the screen, “Chloe, come to the table. Dinner is served.”

With a great sigh, Chloe peeled away from the wood shingles and walked, head hung, to the door.

5
The Irish Inquisition

LANG TURNED ON THE LIGHT ABOVE THE SMALL RECTANGULAR table. They sat silently, their hands folded. They blessed their food. Jimmy said amen. Chloe asked him to pass the potatoes. Jimmy poured Lang a jasmine ice tea. Lang poured Jimmy a beer. They cut into their pork chops. The silence lasted two or three minutes. Jimmy had to get some strength before he began, though he looked pretty strong already. He was a big Irish guy, blond-haired once, now gray, blue-eyed, direct, no nonsense. He was funny, he was easy, but he also had a temper, and he never forgot anything, neither a favor nor a slight. It was almost his undoing, the merciless blade of his memory. Sometimes he had to dull it with whiskey. Sometimes he had to dull many things with whiskey. Tonight Lang eased him into Chloe’s summer plans by letting him eat for a few minutes in peace while she grilled Chloe on irrelevant matters.

“Did you do your homework?”

“I didn’t have any. It’s senior year, Mom. No one gives homework anymore.”

“Then what do they give you a fourth quarter grade for?”

“Showing up mostly.”

“So no tests, no quizzes, no overdue projects, no missing labs, no oral presentations, no incomplete class assignments?”

“Not to my knowledge, no.”

“Enough nonsense,” said Jimmy, having fortified himself on meat. “What’s this your mother tells me about Barcelona?”

Her father looked straight at her, and Chloe had no choice but to stare back. “Did my mother tell you that she wants me to enter into a story contest? Ten thousand dollar prize.”

“She mentioned something about that, yes. I don’t see how the two are related.”

“I have nothing to write about.”

“Come to work with me for a day or two. You’ll get three books out of it.” Jimmy Devine was the Fryeburg chief of police, like his father and grandfather before him. Fryeburg, Maine. Pop. 3500. Settled in 1763 by General Joseph Frye and incorporated in 1777, exactly two hundred years before the bad luck of the paleo floods two thousand miles away, and now Chloe sat impaled on the stake of parental disapproval.

“Really,” she said, irritated. “Books on what, breaking up domestic arguments and littering?”

“Nice. So now even my work, not just your mother’s, is denigrated?”

Chloe regrouped. “I’m not denigrating, Dad. But our hearts are set on Spain. Hannah and I have been talking about it for years.”

“You told your mother you thought of going just today. So which is it? An impulse or a lifelong dream?”

Chloe didn’t reply. They were denigrating her!

“How in the world can Hannah afford Barcelona?” Jimmy asked. “Her mother is at the bank every other day asking for an overdraft increase. And your friend, who abandoned you to do Meals on Wheels by yourself on Saturdays because she claims she has a job, often skips out on the one lousy four-hour shift she has at China Chef. So where’s her half of the money going to come from?”

Chloe hated that her dad knew everything about everybody’s business. It was terrifying. She stopped eating and stared at her father, the last bite of pork chop lodged in her dry throat. Did he know why Hannah was skipping out on China Chef? Oh God, please, no. A demoralized Chloe couldn’t withstand even two minutes of modest interrogation.

“Why do you want to go so much? Tell your mother and me.”

Chloe said nothing. Her entrails in knots, she felt like a scoundrel.

“Is it because we went without you that time to Kilkenny?” Jimmy said. “You’re lucky you didn’t go. Funerals are not for kids.”

And just like that the three of them were swallowed up by silent oceans. Jimmy awkwardly picked up his fork only to drop it. Lang nursed her jasmine tea. Sickened by the ghastly turn of the already difficult conversation, Chloe tried to right the course.

“It’s not about that. It’s not about funerals,” Chloe said. “It’s not about anything. It’s just awesome Spain. Why do you think I’ve been taking Spanish these last six years? I’m the only senior still taking a language. That’s why. Dad, I’m not a child anymore.”

“If you’re such an adult,” said Jimmy, “then what are you talking to us for?”

“I need your help with the passport.”

“Oh, now she needs us,” Jimmy said. “Just a signature. No help, no advice. No money. You have everything now, big girl. You’ve got it all figured out.”

“I don’t, but … it’s just a few weeks in Europe, Dad. Lots of kids do it.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.” Chloe stumbled. “Lots of kids.” No one from her school.

“It’s the worst place, by the way, to have a vacation,” Lang cut in.

“Why is it the worst place? It’s the best place! Have you been there, Mom?”

“I don’t need to go to Calcutta to know I don’t want to go to Calcutta.”

“Calcutta? Can we calm down? It’s Barcelona! It’s on the sea. It’s nice. It’s fun. It’s full of young people.”

“Did I hear your mother correctly?” Jimmy asked. “The two junkyard wildings down the road want to go with you?”

Well, at least it was out there. The pit in her stomach couldn’t get any bigger. “Why wildings? It’s Blake and Mason. You like them.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth or feelings into my heart.”

“You do like them. Mr. Haul is still your friend. Despite everything.” Chloe took a breath. “You help him out with money, you lend him your truck, you barbecue with him. You exchange Christmas presents. Mom gives them tomatoes.”

“What does that prove? Your mother gives tomatoes to everyone, even the Harrisons who tried to kill Blake’s dog. And in my line of work, I’m forced to talk to a lot of unsavory characters.”

“Mr. Haul is not one of them. And Mom and Mrs. Haul are friends.”

“Don’t get carried away,” said Lang. “I drive to ShopRite with her. She is not the executor of my will. So don’t hyperbolize.”

After a pause, Chloe said, “Now who’s hyperbolizing?”

“I don’t know why anyone, especially my daughter, would want to go to Spain of all places,” Jimmy said, getting up from the table, as if done with the conversation he was himself continuing. “Do you think there’s any place more beautiful than coastal Maine? Than the White Mountains of New Hampshire?” He snorted as he scraped the remains of his dinner into the trash. “You have staggering beauty outside your own door.”

“That’s what I told her, Jimmy.”

“Would that I had a chance to compare,” said Chloe.

“I’m telling you how it is.”

“So I have to take your word for it? I want to see for myself, Dad!”

“Where did this crazy idea even come from? Lang, did you know about this?”

“Jimmy,” said Lang, “she doesn’t know anything about Barcelona. If she did, she wouldn’t want to go. Believe me.”

How did one not raise one’s voice when confronted by a mother such as Chloe’s mother? “Mom,” Chloe said slowly, which was her equivalent of a raised voice. The slower the speech, the more she wanted to shout. At the moment, she was positively hollering. “I know you think I might not know anything about Barcelona. But what in the world do you possibly know about Barcelona?”

“Chloe! Be respectful to your mother.”

“That wasn’t respectful?” If only her parents could hear how Hannah talked to her mother.

Lang raised her hand. She was still at the table, across from Chloe. “No, no. Chloe makes a valid point. Clearly she thinks Barcelona has virtues Maine doesn’t.”

“I think it because it’s true,” Chloe said. “It has stunning architecture. Art. History. Culture.”

“You think we don’t have architecture?” Jimmy bellowed.

“Houses are not the same as architecture, Dad!”

“Don’t shout! Since when do you care about architecture? It’s the first time in my life I’ve heard you use that word. Now you want to go halfway around the globe to learn more about house design?”

Chloe found it difficult to speak through a clenched mouth. “Art. Culture. History.”

“So go visit Boston,” Lang said, pushing away from the table. “There’s a big city for you. It has Art. Culture. History. It has architecture.”

“Maine has history too.” Jimmy tried not to sound defensive about his home state. “What about the Red Paint People?”

“Dad, okay, history is not why I want to go to Spain.”

“Why then?”

“I bet it’s to lie on the beach all day,” said Lang.

“And what’s wrong with the beach?”

“You can lie on a beach in Maine!” Jimmy yelled.

“Chloe! Look what you did. You’ve upset your father. Jimmy, shh.” Walking over, Lang put a quieting hand on her husband.

Taking hold of Lang’s hand, Jimmy continued. They both stood a few feet away from Chloe, near the sink, united in their flummoxed anxiety. Chloe continued to sit and stare into her cold, half-eaten chop. “What about York Beach?” he said. “We’ve got five hundred miles of spectacular sandy coastline. How many miles does Barcelona have?”

“Is it warm?” said Chloe. “Is it beachy? Is it Mediterranean?”

“Do you see?” Lang said. “She doesn’t even know where Barcelona is. It’s on the Balearic Sea, for your information.”

Chloe couldn’t help herself. She groaned. Clearly, in between grilling swine and sugar-dusting Linzer tarts, her mother had opened an encyclopedia and was now using some arcane knowledge to … Chloe didn’t know what.

“Mom,” Chloe said, so slowly it came out as mommmmmmmmm. A raw grunt left her throat. “The Balearic Sea is part of the Mediterranean. Look at the map. Don’t do this.”

Undeterred, her mother continued. “They didn’t even have any beaches fifteen years ago. They built them for the Olympic Games. That’s your history right there. Don’t pretend you’re all about the Barcelona sand. Maine has had beaches for five hundred years.”

Chloe blinked at her mother. Lang blinked back defiantly. “Mom, so what? What does that have to do with anything? What does that have to do with me going or not going?”

“Don’t raise your voice to us,” Jimmy said. “So if it’s not for the beach, why do you want to go? Do you want to prove something?”

“I don’t want to prove anything. To anybody,” Chloe said through closed teeth. “I. Just. Want. To. Go. That’s it. You want to know why Barcelona and not Rome or Athens or some other place? Okay, I’ll tell you. Because while you were gallivanting through the glens of Kilkenny and I stayed with Hannah and her mom, Blake bought me a magazine.”

“Oh, well, if Blake bought you a magazine …”

“A National Geographic,” Chloe continued through the sarcasm. “There was an article on Barcelona in it. It sounded nice. So Hannah and I said to each other we’d go when we graduated.”

“So you want to go to Barcelona to punish us, is that it?”

Chloe wanted to scream. “Why would I want to punish you?” she said. “Do you want to punish me? Is that why you’re doing this? It’s not about you. It’s not about anything. Hannah and I fell in love with it when we were kids. We thought it would be fun to go when we grew up. And here we are. All grown up. Her mother is letting her go. Her mother is treating her like an adult. And yet my mother and father are still treating me like I’m eleven years old!”

“Can you act like an adult,” Lang said, “and stop being so melodramatic?”

No one spoke for a moment. Then her father did.

“All I know about Barcelona,” he said, turning toward the sink, “is that in Spain, the drivers are considered the worst in the world.” His back was to his wife and daughter. He didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t face them as he spoke. “It’s a well-known, established fact. The worst drivers in the world.”

Putting her soothing hand on Jimmy, Lang glared at Chloe, as if to say, do you see what you’ve done?

Chloe opened her hands. “I won’t be driving, Daddy. I promise.” Her feeble voice oozed with pity and penitence. The fight had gone out of her.

“You’ll be walking, though, won’t you,” Jimmy said, “while others are driving, poorly.” He lowered his head.

“Not even, Jimmy,” said Lang, caressing her husband’s squared back. “Didn’t you hear her? She’ll be lying on a brand-new beach. Admiring the architecture.”

6
Mottos

EVERYONE HAD A MOTTO. CHLOE’S MOTHER’S WAS: “CAST your bread upon the water.”

Her grandmother’s was, “How I envy the handicapped in their wheelchairs who can push themselves around. They don’t know how lucky they are.”

And Chloe’s? Once, to go miniature golfing, Courtney and Crystal arrived at Chloe’s green cabin wearing slinky hot pink dresses and clangy bangles. Lang took one squinted glimpse at the two and stage-whispered to Chloe, “Where are they going to, a parade at a bordello?”

That became Chloe’s motto: To avoid at all costs such an assessment by anyone’s mother, including her own, or by, God forbid, a boy.

Okay, no, that wasn’t Chloe’s motto. That was her wish. You know what Chloe’s motto was?

On the blank canvas of your life with bold colors paint.

Maybe not so much a motto as an unattainable goal.

Chloe just wanted to know who she was. Not who she wanted to be. But who she actually was.

Up in the loft attic open to the living room, she lay on her bed with the ballerina-pink fluffy down quilt and soft pillows, clutching a tattered 1998 National Geographic to her chest, the one with the precious Barcelona article in it. When Polly, the old wizened woman who owned the Shell gas station in Fryeburg, decided to go into the used book selling business, running it out of her garage, Blake, out with his dad one afternoon, picked up a worn copy of the magazine. He paid two dollars of his allowance to buy it for Chloe when she was eleven and he was twelve. Reading about Barcelona burst her heart into a flame.

She’d read the article so many times since then, she had it practically committed to memory. Redeeming touch of madness. Millionaires on motorbikes, witches caked in charcoal dust, pimps and uncrowned kings. Miro, Picasso, Dali, firebombed girls in whorehouses. Just think about that! Firebombed girls in whorehouses. Barcelona has been inventing herself for a thousand years. With her parents talking below her in their tiny bedroom next to the front door, a nearly defeated Chloe caressed the cover of the magazine, pressed to her breasts, kneaded it like a rosary, prayed to God, please, please, please, and strained to hear the snippets of their parenting. From up here, it was just rising and falling pitch, up down, questions, quiet replies, voices, tempers, tides. For some reason her father’s voice was muffled, unclear. Her mother’s alto rose through the rafters.

Jimmy yelling suddenly and Lang yelling back. The walk down that long dirt road from the school bus is responsible for Barcelona, she says, and Jimmy yells, are you crazy, Mother?

“Better she go with the boys, Jimmy. Blake keeps everybody safe. He’ll keep her safe.”

She can’t hear her father’s response. Only Lang’s voice is clearly heard.

“I don’t want her to go, either, husband.”

“You know she’s leaving, Jimmy. You know that, right? She’s leaving home in three months. For good.”

“Okay, I’ll tell her she can’t go.”

“Don’t be sick with worry, Jimmy. She’ll be fine. Disaster won’t fall on us twice.”

Now Chloe hears her father’s voice. “Not on us,” he says. “On her.”

Chloe crept on her hands and knees to the railing, as if crawling on all fours would make the attic floor less creaky. Her Barcelona magazine on the planks in front of her, she pressed her face between the slats. They didn’t want her to go. She expected nothing less. Her parents weren’t Terri Gramm. They were never going to say, oh, sure, honey, Barcelona with the Spanish boys and your two horny boyfriends and topless beaches and incorrigible Hannah. And you, our only child, who’s never been anywhere without us, not a problem, you go, girl.

Chloe wanted so desperately to graduate, to be self-reliant, to sign her own applications, to take herself out of state, to travel on her own, to be grown up, that it was a physical ache throughout her whole body. A throbbing. What do I have to do, her body cried, to be taken seriously, to be thought of as a fledged human being, not just a fledgling? What do I have to do? It is so painful to live like this, thwarted, dependent.

Her ear was wedged between the slats, listening for a possible seachange.

What else could Chloe say to persuade them? Mom! she wanted to cry. I want to be the girl who later in life when she was old could say, yes, when I was young I traveled by myself on a train through Spain. I don’t want to be the girl who will tell her kid, no, I’ve never been anywhere, except North Dakota where I was born, and Maine where I married your father, and Kilkenny one time when somebody died, somebody who with his wanton recklessness ended up wrecking my careful life.

But Chloe couldn’t say that, just as she couldn’t say that maybe in Barcelona she would have sex with her boyfriend. Or that she might sunbathe topless on the man-made beach, built just in time for her Olympian topless body.

As she sat with her ear to the empty air below, she cupped her hands under her breasts and bounced them up and down. She wanted to sunbathe topless in front of Hannah, so that in this one way, she could come out slightly ahead, because Hannah bested her in everything else. Hannah was always playing a game of one-upmanship. Why couldn’t Chloe play just this once? Hannah was passive-aggressive, a constant downer, not a smiler, an inveterate shopper who made Chloe spend more of her allowance than she ever wanted to, to try to keep up with blouses, skirts, dresses, the latest boots and gloves. The size 2 girl who was always dieting, who told everyone she was fat, the long-limbed girl, aristocratically mouthed, and small-pointy-breasted. What other city could offer Chloe this particular intangible? Bathing topless on the beach in front of their two boyfriends and a city full of strangers, so she could win. How small. How stupid. And yet how completely essential. Could she do that in York, Maine? How could Chloe’s noblest desires fly side by side with her soaring pettiness?

Hannah, who was loved through and through by Blake, and still, it wasn’t enough.

Chloe fell asleep on the floor, her head pressed into the railing. She was woken up at one in the morning by her mother, who helped her into bed.

Please, Mom, she whispered half-asleep, reaching out to touch her mother’s face, or maybe she only thought she whispered. You wanted to be a dancer once. Let me do this one thing for me, but also for you. Let me live what you never lived, far away in whirling dancing noise and nights of magic flowers until the world blows up.

7
Olivia the Dancing Pig

CHLOE DIDN’T KNOW HOW BLAKE HAD MANAGED IT, BUT BY the time her mother dropped her off in front of the Academy bus circle the next morning, every single person she met on the way to homeroom knew about their impending Catalonian Bacchanalian sexcapade. That must have been how Blake painted it, judging from the arched eyebrows and the innuendo smiles.

“Who do you think you are, Isabel Archer?” was what her mother had asked her as she pulled into the parking lot.

Chloe looked at her blankly. Lang stared back. She folded her plump arms. “You have no idea who Isabel Archer is, do you? What do they even teach you? Finest prep school in the United States indeed. Go learn something before you graduate.”

Her friends Taylor, Courtney, Regan, Matthew, his sister Miranda, and four girls on the cheer squad—who for some reason were hypnotized into believing Chloe did not despise them—all cornered her between her locker and the door of the physics lab.

“When are you going?”

“Did you already buy your plane tickets?”

“Can I see your passport?”

“Can you bring it to school tomorrow?”

“What’s the weather like in Barcelona?”

“Do you think your Spanish is good enough?”

“Does anyone speak English over there? Because frankly, Chloe, your Spanish isn’t that good.”

“And Mason doesn’t speak Spanish at all,” bubbled up Mackenzie O’Shea. There wasn’t a girl in six counties Chloe hated more than Mackenzie with her twisty body and twisty pigtails and mouth full of Bubblicious gum. One time in Science she popped the huge bubble wad in her mouth, and the gum burst from her cheeks to her chin and she got gum in her hair. In front of everyone. That was an excellent day.

“Where are you going to stay?”

“I can’t believe your dad is letting you go. My dad would never, and he’s not even the chief of police.” That was Mackenzie.

“Are you allowed to drink over there?”

“Really, you shouldn’t drink. You’re not used to it. You’ll vomit. Like that other time.” Still Mackenzie.

“Don’t they drive on the wrong side of the road?”

“I thought the capital of Spain was Madrid. Are you sure it’s not Madrid you’re going to? Because I don’t think Madrid is on the beach. Blake tells us you’re going to an Olympic beach. He’s wrong, isn’t he?”

“My aunt’s second cousin went to Madrid. She said it was dusty.”

“It wasn’t Madrid, genius. It was Mexico City.”

“Same difference. Very dusty. And crowded.”

“Is there skiing there?”

“Do they take American dollars?”

“How would you even change dollars into pesos? Or are they on the euro now?”

“What’s a euro?”

“Blake and Mason are not going to like it. They get very sunburned. Mason especially.” Still fucking Mackenzie.

Not a word was required of Chloe, or even desired.

“You must be thrilled,” Taylor said as they took their seats in Physics. “To travel through Europe with Mason. It’s a dream.”

Chloe heard Mackenzie’s high-strung voice from behind her. “Mason is not a city guy. He’s a ballplayer. A skier. He’s not gonna like it.”

“Don’t be a fool, Mackenzie,” said Taylor, sparing Chloe a crackling response. “You think varsity players don’t like traveling?”

“Not Mason. He doesn’t like empanadas or that weird Spanish food they have over there. Tapas or some shit. He likes burgers. Steak.”

“I swear, I’m going to deck her,” Taylor whispered.

“Get in line,” Chloe whispered back, and after class implored Mason to control his brother who couldn’t keep his big mouth shut about anything.

“Like I can control him,” Mason said, kissing her and running off.

“Are you so psyched?” was the first thing Blake said to her as they took their seats in Health.

“About what?”

“Barcelona, dumblehead.”

“Do I seem excited to you? Did you tell your parents?”

“Of course. They couldn’t be happier. They can’t believe you girls were thinking of going on your own. Dad said Chief Devine would never allow it.”

Chloe mumbled unintelligibly.

“Mom said she wants us to protect you from the big bad Europeans.” Blake laughed.

“Why’d you have to go tell everybody?” Chloe was churlish. “You and your big mouth. What if my parents say no?”

“Haiku, you funny.” Blake patted her arm as he flipped open his spiral notebook. “You didn’t think your mother would just buy you a plane ticket to Spain, did you? The woman didn’t let you take the school bus until your senior year and even now still drives you in the morning. She was hardly going to run to Liberty Travel in North Conway. They need to think it over.”

“Yes. And then say no.”

“They loves you. Why would they say no to the one they loves?”

Blake knew nothing. Lang was gearing up to say no. She was making heavenly lemon pound cake when Chloe got home from school, a consolation dessert if ever there was one.

“For your information, Mom,” Chloe said, having fortified herself with a shallow knowledge of Henry James’s monumental novel and worked on her riposte all day, “Isabel Archer came into a fortune. That will hardly be me. Are you afraid some broke European is going to sweep me off my feet because he is angling for my five hundred bucks?”

“Is that your fantasy?” Lang asked. “To be desired by dangerous men for your meager dollars?”

“Of course not!” She was with Mason, the cutest boy in the Academy halls.

“Then why did you say it so wistfully?”

“I’m not Isabel Archer, Mom. You know who I am? Olivia, the dancing pig. She has a painting of Degas’s ballerinas on her wall, but she’s never going to be either Degas or a ballerina, is she?”

“So now you’re a pig dreaming of being a ballerina?” Lang slid a plate of pound cake in front of her daughter. “What are you doing, Chloe? Are you placing all your hopes on what may lie just around the next bend in the river? You think you can drift on the train from Spain to France not knowing where your next stop will be in the fervent hope that you’ll come closer to an answer to that most profound of human questions?”

“And what question is that, Mom.”

“Who you are, of course.”

Was there ever a mother more infuriatingly on point than her mother!

Hannah was out. Mason was at varsity. Blake was helping Mr. Leary with his concrete-buster block saw. So Chloe scribbled down some notes for a Social Studies oral essay on women’s rights as interpreted by Pearl Buck and watered the garden.

To her surprise, her father came home early.

“Chloe-bear,” Jimmy said. “Your mother and I are not going to talk to you about Barcelona anymore. You know how we feel. We know how you feel. Until we have something to speak to you about, we are going to call truce and talk about other things. Deal?”

“You should’ve told that to Mom,” Chloe said. “Because she’s been going on about Henry James and Huck Finn all afternoon.”

“She told me. That’s why I’m saying this now. Excuse me.” Jimmy moved Chloe out of the way. “Your mother and I are going for a walk.”

“You’re what? Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” her father said. “Because we need privacy to talk about you, and at home you’re always eavesdropping.”

No words more frightening could have been spoken mildly by a gruffly amiable man, who placed his badge and his service weapon on the hall table and donned his spring parka. Lang put on her suede shoes and a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap she had bought at a garage sale even though she’d never heard of the Pirates and thought they were a football team. Off they went, arm in arm, her mother stout, her father expansive, into the hills around the lake.

They were gone an hour.

At dinner they talked of television shows, movies, her graduation party, college. Should she ship her heavier items like a television ahead of time, or should they buy a TV on the other side? And what about a car. She’d definitely need one. How did she feel about a used VW Beetle? Perhaps red? Not a word about Spain was spoken.

The next afternoon, the pattern was the same. Lang made oatmeal raisin cookies, Jimmy came home early, and they vanished through the birches. The third day Chloe began to doubt everything. How important was Barcelona anyway? Why did she have to be so obstinate?

Where could she go that might be more acceptable to her parents? She had read about Innsbruck, the heart of the Alps, white with fresh snow. Picturesque gardens, musical chambers, Roman marvels, Bavarian creams. Her clothes, down coat and all, always on, even in bed.

Ugh.

She spent her entire life living in snowed-in valleys surrounded by mountains. She skied, snowboarded, sledded. She skated right on her lake. She played wild, nearly violent games of ice hockey with her friends. Every four years she and Mason pretended they were Olympic skaters, spinning and salchowing over the thick ice. But Chloe and Blake were actually speed skaters and every winter when they weren’t ice fishing, they spent from sunup to sundown in racing abandon. Chloe owned more parkas than jean jackets. She knew what to do for frostbite. She had read Jack London’s terrifying “To Build a Fire.” More than once.

Why would she go anywhere else but Barcelona? Why would she ever want to?

8
Empty Wells and Vernal Pools

CHLOE ASKED TO BORROW HER MOTHER’S CAR TO DRIVE Hannah to Bangor. She made up some story about dorms and housing applications.

Lang only half-listened. “Are you ever going to tell her?” she asked.

Hannah was headed to Bangor to break up with the grandpa who loved her. He might not make it out of the afternoon alive. Did she really need Chloe adding to her woes? “Of course. But not right now.”

“You’ve been saying that since April. Tell her on the way.”

“I will. Soon.”

“Now’s the perfect time. Um, Hannah, guess what? Our trip to Bangor reminds me of something. That sort of thing. You know she’ll find out eventually.”

“Of course she’ll find out eventually, Mom.” Duh.

“Perhaps when she moves into a UMaine dorm and instead of you her roommate is a tall black chick?”

“Yes, like then. And don’t say chick, Mom. Ew.” If Chloe ground her teeth any more, she’d have no teeth left. Why couldn’t her mother be like Hannah’s mother? Terri never asked questions, never hounded, never scolded. Chloe wasn’t one hundred percent sure Terri knew where her daughter was accepted to college. She was just so chill and lax about things.

“Why won’t you tell her, child? What are you afraid of?”

Why did everybody keep asking her this! What wasn’t she afraid of. That Hannah would not forgive her. That she couldn’t explain it. When she tried to explain it to herself, she could not, so how was she going to explain it to her best friend, and to Mason?

“Have you told Mason at least?”

Chloe didn’t reply.

“Oh dear Lord. Chloe!”

“Mom! Can you please not stress me out? Am I not wound up enough? I tell you what, sign my passport application, and I’ll tell everybody everything in Barcelona.”

“Chloe, you haven’t told your boyfriend you’re leaving for San Diego?”

“Mom, he’ll find out soon enough! He’s got his last varsity game coming up. He’s been in training for three weeks. I didn’t want to bother him. And I only just decided.”

“A month ago.”

“A few weeks ago.” She stuck out her hand, trying not to shake from exasperation. “Please can I have the keys?”

“I’m telling you right now, I’m not doing it,” Lang said, opening her purse. “You’re not hopping on a plane to California and leaving me to mop up your mess.”

“Let me go to Barcelona and I’ll tell them myself.”

“Don’t threaten me, young lady, I won’t stand for it.”

“The keys. Mom. Please.”

In the car, while Hannah was angsting away about Martyn, Chloe wasn’t listening, her focus elsewhere. Had there been silence in the car, she might have attempted a confession. A pretend casual tone. No big deal, Hannah. I know you’re thinking we’re going to UMaine, but did I mention this other place I applied to, three thousand miles away from Bangor, our whole wide country away? A Spanish city with beaches, warmth, no mountains, no snow. Like Barcelona, but in the States.

“Have you applied for your passport yet?”

Chloe snapped out of it. “How can I apply? They haven’t said I can go.”

“Tell them in a firm and convincing manner that you’re going and that’s all there is to it.”

“Yes, right, okay. Do you know what my mother has been doing?” Chloe said. “Buying me books. Frommer’s Guide to Spain’s Coastal Cities. Fun Facts about Barcelona. To Barcelona with Love. DK Guide to Spain’s Most Beautiful Churches.’”

“That’s nice. She’s being helpful.”

“You mean impossible. She says to me, see, honey, you don’t have to go anywhere, you can just read books about it.”

“True, your mother is always advising me to read more,” Hannah said. “She says you can live other lives through books, experience travel, love, sorrow.”

“She’s buying me books so I can see Barcelona from the comfort of my recliner while she makes me éclairs and rum babas.”

“Yeah,” said Hannah. “You have it so tough.”

Chloe drove. She didn’t want to say how much she envied Hannah her parents’ spectacular non-participation. Divorce did that—shifted priorities.

“They make unreasonable demands on me,” Chloe said.

Hannah turned down Nirvana. “I wish somebody would make a demand on me.”

Grandpa is making demands on you, Chloe wanted to say. How’s that going? “I thought you liked that they never asked you for things,” she said instead.

“Turns out, I want to be asked for something.”

“Like what?”

“Anything,” Hannah said. “Just to be asked.” She turned to Chloe. “Why are you so tense? Look at the way your hands are clutching the wheel.”

Chloe tried to relax, really she did.

“I’m the one who should be tense,” said Hannah. “You have no idea how upset he’s going to get.”

Chloe thought long and hard about her next question. “He’s generally in good health, right?” she asked. Like his heart?

“Oh, yes,” Hannah said. “Believe me, there’s nothing wrong with him.”

“Ew, gross. Not what I meant. But okay.”

“What’d you mean?”

“Nothing.”

Hannah was looking too pretty for someone who was about to break up with a nonagenarian. Almost seemed mean. The poor fellow was going to be feeling like shit anyway, why rub it in his face, the youth, the slim feminine attractiveness, the long legs? Hannah even wore a skirt, as if headed to church. Linen skirt as short as the month of February. Navy blue sparkly ballet flats. A cream top. Face deceptively “unmade-up,” yet fully made-up. Eyes moist.

Chloe couldn’t pay too much attention to Hannah’s appealing exterior while driving down a zigzaggy two lane country road, but from a surreptitious corner of her eye, Hannah was looking delectable, not forlorn.

“Hannah, why are you looking so pretty if you’re ending it with him?”

She beamed. “He likes to look at me, that’s all.”

“But you want him to like to look at you less, don’t you?”

Hannah didn’t reply, busy eating her fingers, twisting her knuckles.

To everything there is a season. That was another one of her mother’s mottos. This was emphatically not the season for college confessions. This was a time for lovers. Chloe cleared her throat.

“Can I ask you about Blake?”

“What about him?”

“Don’t you like him?”

“I love him, what are you talking about?”

“Well, then, why …”

Hannah waved at her. “You won’t understand, Chloe. You and Mason are so perfectly aligned.”

“You think so?” Chloe wouldn’t have minded talking about it.

“But it’s different with me and Blake. He’s so sweet, but …” Hannah paused, chewed her nails, stared out at the pines passing by. “Besides the physical, we have little in common. Don’t get me wrong. The physical gets you pretty far. With Blake, believe me, almost the whole way. If it was the only important thing, we’d be in great shape. But aside from that, what do we have? All the things I like, he couldn’t care less about, and all the things he likes I don’t get at all.”

“Blake’s so into you. He likes everything you’re into.”

“What do I care about junk hauling, or building things, or helping old people, or fixing band saws? Or fishing? And what does he care about Paris and museums, and classic literature, and pretty clothes?”

“There are other things …”

“Yes, we’ve done them.” Hannah sighed dramatically. “Do you think that boy will ever live away from his dad? He still helps him into the boat, for God’s sake. He wants to start a junk business. I mean, what am I going to do with someone like that?”

“He also wants to write a book,” said Chloe.

Hannah waved in dismissal. “He and a million others. Me, I want to travel the world. I want to learn three languages. I want to live in a big city. You and I both do. It can’t end with Blake any other way but this way.”

“But that’s the thing,” Chloe said, her gaze on the road. “It’s not ending. If you ended it with him, that’d be one thing. But you’re not.”

Hannah turned to Chloe, frowning disdain on her displeased face. “How do I do that? And then what? What do I do with us?” She made a large air circle, embodying by the broad sweep not just herself and Blake, but Chloe and Mason too. “We are all four of us together every day. We have one life. If I break up with him, what happens to the four of us? Do you even think before you speak? I mean, could you break up with Mason?”

“I don’t want to.”

“But if you did?”

They didn’t talk for a while. The road was narrow, the pines tall, the ride long, what was there to say? Except what a hypocrite Chloe was, what a deceiver. She decided she would tell Hannah about San Diego on the way home, her heart falling through her abdomen at the thought of it.

Chloe underestimated the open and public heartbreak a man near retirement age could display on the walkways of Orono, near the river on the University of Maine campus, when his eighteen-year-old lover told him it had to end.

Chloe stayed as far back as possible. She couldn’t believe Hannah would do this on the avenue where students and faculty strolled on a warm May evening. But his reaction was so extreme that perhaps this was why Hannah had chosen the public square for his flogging; she had hoped he would keep it together. At first they walked arm in arm, overlooking the flowing waters, the mountains beyond. He smiled at her, squeezed her arm. They made quite a picturesque couple against the backdrop of the snow-capped Appalachians.

Hannah spoke. He stopped walking. He took his arm away. She gestured, in her small elegant way, and he stood, a pillar of incomprehension. Then he started to weep. Hannah stroked him, embraced him, talked and talked, a filibuster of consolation. Nothing helped the gray man become less stooped.

Chloe had to stop peeking at his despair. It was as if she had caught him in the shower, or them in a different sort of clinch. She became embarrassed, for herself, for him, for the passersby who slowed down, concerned at his distraught exhortations. He grabbed his chest, as if in the middle of heart failure.

After an hour he was still crying! And Hannah was still rubbing him, talking to him, gesturing far and wide.

Chloe understood nothing of this kind of emotion. Nothing. It seemed to her that logic must prevail in a grown man’s head when he spied himself standing in the middle of the college where he had tenure, bawling because his teenage lover had decided to move on. Not even move on, for Blake was the here and now, just … move sideways. Move back. Move away. How could the enormous common sense of that decision finally—finally!—not triumph over him?

Chloe had been keeping an eye on the time—the thing she usually had least of, next to money—but after ninety minutes her eyes left the watch permanently to pitch silent poison darts in Hannah’s direction, hoping her friend would sense Chloe’s own despair at the tedium of spying on a stranger’s excessive distress. Come on, wrap the whole thing up, put it in a doggy bag, take it home. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! Chloe kept silently shouting. LET’S GO!

There was pacing, but there was no departing.

A hundred and ten minutes. A movie now. First a tragedy, then a comedy, then a farce, now Shoah.

Wait. Something new was happening. The stooped old man nodded. He let Hannah hug him, pat him.

Unfounded optimism. There he was, crying again. He could barely stand on his grieving geriatric legs. Carefully Hannah helped him over to a bench, and sat down next to her soon-to-be-erstwhile lover, continuing to cajole and comfort him.

The girls had a three-hour ride back home.

“Did you see him?” Hannah asked.

Oh, I saw him all right. Saw him, heard him, memorized him. I could play him by heart on the piano, that’s how well I’ve studied him.

“Yes,” said Chloe.

How could she tell Hannah about college?

She couldn’t. And didn’t.

She wanted to ask if Hannah loved Blake half as much. Would she shed a quarter of Martyn’s tears when it came time to say goodbye to Blake? Would she miss him an eighth as deeply? What was it called when it wasn’t pain, but a fraction of pain? Grimly Chloe closed her hands on the wheel.

“What happens next, Chloe?”

“I don’t know, Hannah. What happens next?”

It was going to get dark soon. Her mother would be worried. Nothing to do but drive on. “Remember Darlene Duranceau?”

“Who could ever forget her? Why would you bring her up, of all people?”

Chloe shrugged. “I’m trying to make a point about what happens next.”