1503951200 by Camille Griep Read Free Book Online

believe in you,” she says. “Always have.” She lifts a hand and turns back toward her desk across the hall, the cat trotting ahead.
    I kneel down in front of Mina. “I’m going to miss you both a lot. Promise you’ll take good care of Agnes and Doc for me. Remember to take all your medicine and try not to stay up all night reading, okay? And no more than two cans of tuna a day for Buster, even if he asks.”
    She nods. Buster gives me a lick on the cheek. “Syd?” she asks. “Can you bring me something?”
    “Anything, Mina. What would you like?” I remember asking my mom the same thing whenever she flew to Dallas or Vegas or Atlanta for work, and she’d bring back things like snow globes and T-shirts. Maybe New Charity still has those things. Maybe not.
    “I just want something from somewhere else.”
    I blink back tears. “You got it.”
    “And Syd?”
    “Yes, Mina?”
    Her voice is barely above a whisper. “Could you not forget to come back?”
    I’ve now officially lost it. I bury a kiss in her hair, and lower my—Mom’s—sunglasses so she won’t see me crying.
    I want to enshrine her smile and Buster’s bad breath and last night’s dinner by candlelight, at which Agnes, Mina, and I followed our tuna and corn with two stale Zingers apiece—usually reserved for birthdays. I taught Mina Danny’s old trick of pulling the frosting off in one piece and eating it last.
    I wrap my arms around her, trying to hold in these last memories. To keep the good parts, and forget the bad. But I can’t regret this decision to leave before I’ve followed through. Someone has to try.
    “I’ll see you soon,” I say to Mina.
    “See you soon,” she echoes. Buster barks.
    “Ready?” I ask Cress, idling on the curb. I slide into the driver’s seat, hoping like hell that we are.

    The old interstate is good for the first thirty miles or so. The police have had crews filling potholes with gravel in exchange for food for a couple of years. Things don’t start to get dicey until the pass. The weather and the constant, subtle shifting of the earth have buckled the pavement, and boulders block the way in places. We have some close calls, but nothing I can’t mince my way through.
    I’m exhausted by the time night falls onto the road in front of me, neck stiff and eyes dry. I almost have to pry my fingers off the steering wheel, and my knees are shaky when I get out to find a tree—a silly precaution when I’m probably the only human within five miles.
    Back in the car, I inhale a can of tuna, and lean the seat back. Dawn comes in what seems like a few minutes, even though I’ve had several hours.
    Cress is running well and I pat her on the steering wheel every hour or so with encouraging pep talks in between singing to my mom’s old cassette tapes. In this way, day two for the most part mimics day one, but Doc has managed to slip me a can of SpaghettiOs, which I eat in between grateful sobs, wondering in all this vast silence and tree line whether I’ve gone completely insane.
    When the third day dawns, things feel easier. For better or for worse, I’ll spend the night in my childhood bedroom with the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.
    It’s remarkably quiet as we pass over the flat farmland on the other side of the pass. I see deer, fox, and other animals that are too fast to identify. Occasionally I see smoke from a campfire, but it’s always too far away to bother with. It’s Cress and me, dodging the dandelions springing up from the road, the sections of washboard, finding newer sections that we can almost take at speed, creeping over ruts deeper than the car’s wheels.
    I watch the odometer tick upwards. Five hours, four. I turn off the interstate where half a sign still reads “Charity 10 Miles”—the “New” having blown away some time ago.
    At the bottom of the off-ramp, after crossing a teeth-chattering cattle guard, Cress coughs, then sputters, and the gas pedal stops working. The