Off Course by Michelle Huneven Read Free Book Online Page A

homes and hired Rick to remodel it. He had also taken over from a bankrupt contractor a six-thousand-square-foot folly owned by a Tulare businessman named Rodinger. The Hartleys’ new cabin would be his first custom home at the Meadows—or anywhere.
    After running Rick’s errands, Cress shopped for Julie (and herself) at Younts supermarket, where local produce was set out in field crates: blushing Bartlett pears, leathery pomegranates, frilly bouquets of chard and kale, late-season melons still dusty from the melon patch.
    On her way back up the hill, she spotted Jakey’s truck at the Hapsaw Lodge and found him in the restaurant eating. The woman across from him was a good ten years his senior—glasses, loose neck, dyed-dark pageboy.
    â€œAh, Cress,” he said. “Meet Honor. She owns this joint.”
    Honor gave Cress’s hand a dry, indifferent shake and went back to her steak. Jakey’s hands hovered above his silverware.
    â€œWell, bye, I guess.” Suddenly embarrassed, Cress scratched the air in a silly little wave.
    â€œLike any professionals,” Jakey told her later, “lodge owners have a need for collegiality.”
    *   *   *
    He’d stop by, he said, before going to town on Friday, or afterward if he was pressed for time. When he hadn’t shown up by eight that night, she called the lodge and spoke to his answering machine. “It’s me. You coming up or what? I mean, uh, don’t heat the oven if you’ve got nothing to bake.”
    Half an hour later, he was in her bed. She liked his heft. A chest she could barely reach around. His ruddy skin and strong legs, his readiness to be amused. He was such a large man, big arms, big laugh, big personality. Yet he blushed at compliments and frank sexual suggestions. Cress didn’t push for more than he freely gave. There’d be no point in pushing a man like Jakey, who did all things for the joy in them.
    *   *   *
    Time opened up all around her, free time, empty time, chasms of time. Time to take stock of the light hour by hour, the syrupy sunrises and blanching noons, the wan starlight on moonless nights. Time to gauge the nip of fall, chart the yellowing of aspen leaves, note the close of fishing season and the first cracks of shotguns aimed at quail and doves. Time to drift about the house to George Jones and Lefty Frizzell—Jakey’s favorites—and to Beethoven’s late quartets and Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations straight through. Time to talk for hours late at night to Tillie, and to read—finally!—faded back issues of The New Yorker . Here in the shortening days, time was vast and all her own; no more lunch shifts at the Dinner Plate, no more spongy white uniforms and orthopedic clompers, or tainting disapproval from moronic male managers.
    Into the yawning hours also came sudden drops and voids, onrushes of anxiety. She was alone at 7,300 feet. The man she thought about slipped in and out of sight. The typewriter, whenever she approached, made her sleepy. In the A-frame’s basement she found her old easel, a Christmas present in high school; she set it up and started sketching in charcoal: rocks and a cluster of spruce. Her powers felt thin in that high air. But they’d felt thin in Pasadena, too.
    Afternoons, she took the same four-mile loop she’d devised as a teenager, tramping overland to the Bauer cabin. The meadows had dried out sufficiently so she could cross them without sinking into slime. She checked the deep channel for trout—Jakey said there were native goldens in there—then followed its oxbows to the log cabin. Even on weekends, she rarely encountered another soul. Once, a man was balanced on the cabin’s porch railing. The owner, she thought, but closer, with a proprietary pang, she recognized one of Rick’s finish carpenters, the older, less friendly of two brothers working at the