The Measures Between Us by Ethan Hauser Read Free Book Online

course, I’ve taken too much of your time already,” said the shop teacher. “I’m not too good on the phone. Otherwise you wouldn’t have had to come in. It would have saved you a trip.”
    â€œI didn’t mind,” said Henry. “It was a nice excuse to come back and see the place.”
    â€œCongratulations again on your wife’s pregnancy.”
    â€œThank you.” Henry thought of Lucinda, of the baby growing inside her. He thought of the moment he would murmur a name, sense a tiny heartbeat. He waved good-bye to the shop teacher and left the kindergarten classroom, feeling a happiness that seemed unfair.

Chapter Three
    Moths freckled the porch screen. It was late for them, Jack thought; they usually disappeared earlier in the summer, just after the longest days of the year. Up close their wings looked like mottled tissue paper, the moon shrouded with clouds. If you flicked on a light, they would swarm there, flying endless, jittery loops around it. Maybe all the recent rain had tricked them into believing it was a different season. Jack decided he would ask one of his internship supervisors whether the floods had an impact on insects.
    He stared at them while he sat in his car, listening to a talk-show host rant about the Red Sox. Any losing streak, no matter how minor, sparked intense ire: the manager needed to be fired, the overpriced stars traded. The owners were a target, then the farm system, the third-base coach. No one was safe. Scorch it all and start anew, see what grows from the remains. Across New England, the team was about more than just baseball.
    He turned down the radio and thought about where he was headed: to Cynthia’s house, where he often went even though he knew she wasn’t there. The last time he had seen her was a few weeks earlier, when they had gone to a movie. When he dropped her off at her home, she told him she was going out of town,though she didn’t say where and she’d been vague about when she would come back.
    He eased the gas pedal toward the floor and pulled away from his house. He found a classic-rock station on the radio. A Stones song was playing, the one whose opening was like classical music, and he liked it because it showed that things that seem far apart actually aren’t. The route to Cynthia’s would take him through the modest downtown, down Main Street with its bright new coffeehouses and shabby antique shops side by side with empty furniture stores and restaurants.
    It was too early in the night for the dropouts who liked to cruise up the avenue leaning half out their windows. They revved their engines, and Jack liked watching them slap their car doors and call at the girls and sing along too loud to the radio. He and Cynthia sometimes sat on the curb and gazed at them rolling by, all the recklessness on parade. His thigh brushed hers, and it made everything seem noisier and faster and more right.
    The tourists would come later, when the hillsides shifted from green to orange, red, yellow in the space of a couple weeks. It happened so fast, as if someone had flipped a switch. They were mostly from Boston and its suburbs, and for a few weeks their shiny SUVs colonized the streets and parking lots, as if the town was an attraction dreamed up by photographers, not somewhere people lived and worked. They were coming for the foliage, but Jack couldn’t help wondering if something else was drawing them—if they’d suddenly noticed the trees disappearing from their cities and were hungry to see forest.
    He drove by the school where he had first met Cynthia, its hallways and classrooms still fresh in his mind. It sat midway up a hill, an impressive redbrick building with a Latin frieze inscribedatop its face. He used to know what it translated to, but not anymore. There were budget problems every few years, hectoring editorials in the newspaper, letters to the editor from irate mothers, apologies from