Northward to the Moon by Polly Horvath Read Free Book Online

that even remotely make sense? And how the heck would he even find the Carriers?”
    “You
found them,” I say.
    “Yeah, but I wasn’t
looking
for them,” says Ned.
    “So, it must be even easier to find them if you are,” I insist. “What I can’t figure out is why he thought you would be there again. I mean, he knew you left years ago.”
    “Unless he wasn’t really looking for me, he waslooking for a remote safe place to drop a bag of money.”
    “If all you want is somewhere to hide something then there’s got to be more convenient remote places than northern B.C. If you don’t think John is capable of larceny then there must be another explanation,” says my mother.
    “I don’t know. People change. People grow old, people die, people get scared, people go away, people have kids, people don’t. All kinds of things change them.”
    “Maybe he was going on vacation,” says my mother.
    “What kind of vacation?” says Ned in skeptical tones.
    My mother thinks for a moment. “A cruise!”
    “A cruise?”
    “People go on those Alaskan cruises. I think they leave from British Columbia.”
    “On the coast. He wasn’t on the coast.”
    “Maybe he was making his way to the coast.”
    But Ned goes on as if he hasn’t listened to a word she’s said. “Well, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to
think
about this. I don’t know what I’msupposed to
do
with it. This is a lot of money! And I’ll tell you another thing, I want nothing to do with it. It’s going back to John.”
    “Are we going to have to go
somewhere else
to find your brother before we can go home?” asks Maya in very cranky tones.
    “I don’t know,” says Ned.
    My mother turns to address Maya, who is turning around to face her. “We’re going to do whatever we have to, Maya. We’re a family now and Ned’s family is our family too.”
    My mother is keeping this chirpy and cheerful but I see something in her eyes. Some foreboding. Some glimmer that we are heading south and it will be a long time before fate takes us east and back home.

The Wild West
    N obody really likes Nevada.
    We have had a long trip down through Washington and Oregon. Through many different landscapes that didn’t quite jibe with the Outlaw Adventures, as I have come to think of them. But when we hit Nevada we hit the Wild West. Now we are talking. There are
tumbleweeds
. It is a horrible place, really. Perfect!
    At a gas station outside of some small town, while my mother and Maya use the restroom and Hershel and Max pick out a chocolate bar, I say to Ned, “We’re real outlaws now, with a bag of ill-gotten gains in a vast forlorn dangerous deadly snake-ridden moonscape. Isn’t this cool?”
    “Not so cool, Bibles, not so cool,” he says. He is already peeling the paper off a Nestlé Crunch bar. The candy bar decision is never a long debate for Ned. He just grabs the first one he sees. I think this is very telling but I’m not sure exactly what it tells.
    “How do you pick a candy bar so fast?” I ask, thinking out loud. “It takes me forever to decide whether I want a Snickers or a PayDay.”
    “First off, never get the PayDay,” says Ned.
    The thing about having two adults in the family now is that you get a whole other frame of reference. My mother would never be able to pontificate on candy bar selection.
    “I like nuts,” I say.
    “Yes. But nuts are optional, unlike chocolate. What is the point of a chocolate bar without chocolate?” asks Ned.
    “We could buy a lot of candy bars with our outlaw money.” I keep hoping to rekindle his excitement. Ever since we left the Carriers he has looked haunted more than wild and free and roguish.
    “This is a bag of
real
money, Jane,” he says. “I don’t want to play games with this. I certainly don’twant to spend it all on chocolate bars. I just want to return it and go back to Massachusetts like we promised your mom, okay?”
    Suddenly the guy behind the cash register looks real