Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

home.
    Everyone has a home. They might hate it but it is still home. I pass that thought on but she doesn’t reply. Silence would indicate some bad history. I think so. It is none of my business. Still I wonder, as you do. I wonder how she came to this neighbourhood, to this town, and why she sleeps on the bench, and if she has to sleep out why that bench. Is there something special about that bench? We are back there now. I look up at the windows. My wife will be sleeping. I will crawl back to bed and she won’t know I have been gone. Just when I think she has swallowed her tongue she answers—Berlin. Berlin. That’s where she wants to go. Then she asks me which road she should take. I almost laugh. I tell her there is no arrow at the end of the street pointing to Berlin, Germany. She says she plans to thumb a ride. But she’s lost. For the moment at least. Her last ride was angry with her for some reason. He dropped her in an out-of-the-way place. She walked here. She walked until she came to this park. The autoroute is ten k, too far to walk. She has a road guide with her. But our town is too small to have a street directory in it. I offer to drive her to the on ramp. She looks at me as if I might be wanting something in return. But I don’t. Just to help if I can. I tell her to wait. The car is parked at my mother-in-law Gina’s place up the road. But first I have to climb the stairs back to the apartment to get the keys. In the front room I look out the window. She’s standing by the bench looking both ways as if she is expecting someone. Briefly I consider ditching my offer and going back to bed. It would be so much easier.
    I’m still thinking that thought as I close the apartment door and run down the stairs. She’s ready, all set to go, clutching her plastic bag. We walk up the road to Gina’s. Now Gina is an insomniac. A real insomniac. It would be just like her, just my luck, for her to look out the window and see her son-in-law who I feel she tolerates rather than loves walking the street with an unidentified black woman. I look up at Gina’s windows half expecting to see her. The garage has a roller door. It makes a low rumbling which I never hear during the day. I finish winding and point to the passenger side of the wagon. When she gets in she closes the door quietly after her. It’s a small thing, but I notice it. Closing the door quietly like that. Makes me feel slightly uneasy. But then she clips on her seatbelt and I find that reassuring. At least she is not a criminal or an addict. Once she would have been an explorer and I would have been a Bedouin offering my hospitality to her in the night. You see—you see what’s going on here. Already I’m thinking about my story, and how to explain, should my wife wake up in the night to find me gone.
    There’s little traffic. Some trucks making their way back to the autoroute. I have to stop short of the ramp. I don’t want to get onto the autoroute. Otherwise it’ll be another thirty minutes before I can get off the thing. So I park and get out of the car. She gets out her side. I point her in the right direction. We can hear the traffic, that low roar overhead. I feel as though I’m about to push her off the side of a mountain. She is young. God only knows what she has in front of her. Berlin. I was there years ago. My wife took the photos. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known I was there. I was there for a reunion and drunk three days. There is a photograph of me standing before Brandenburg Gate. I am looking up and smiling at something I have no recollection of, none at all. Before we part I give her all the change I am carrying. Ten euros. Because she is so grateful I tell her, ‘Wait, there’s more.’ A twenty-euro note in my back pocket. She’s reluctant to take it. I have to press it into her hand. At least she won’t go hungry for a day or two. I walk with