Picture Me Gone by Meg Rosoff Read Free Book Online Page A

There are two lanes in each direction, and for a while the road is lined with fast-food joints and shops with names like Garden Furniture World and Christmas Pavilion.
    Honey has the resigned air of a seasoned traveler. She seems happier in the car than in the house, though it’s hard to imagine she guesses our mission. I would like to sit in the back with her. I have always wanted a dog.
    Jet lag makes me hungry at funny times and I didn’t eat much breakfast so now I’m starving, and when I see a sign for DINAH’S DINER NEXT RIGHT , I make Gil risk our lives to swerve across the outside lane for the slip road but it’s worth it for the most beautiful silver and glass diner with metallic blue trim. Gil parks and I open the windows partway and tell Honey we’ll be back. She lays her head on her paws and doesn’t look at me.
    Inside, the man at the counter waves at us to take any booth and then brings us menus in huge padded red leatherette folders. It’s translation time.
    I could have one, two or three eggs any style (over easy, hard, sunny-side up, scrambled, poached), pancakes, French toast, waffles, hash browns, bacon, sausage patty or corned beef hash with toast (white/whole wheat/rye/sourdough), coffee black or regular. Regular what?
    I go for two eggs sunny-side up with toast (rye), plus fresh-squeezed orange juice and at the last minute add pancakes out of greed. Gil orders the bottomless cup of coffee and French toast, which seems to come only seconds after we’ve ordered—big thick slices of bread all browned in egg and butter and served with icing sugar round the edges and a glass jug of maple syrup. I look at his plate and wish I’d ordered that.
    Our waitress has a brown and white uniform with a green plastic badge that says her name is Merilynne. She’s nice and friendly and asks where us folks are from. I just love your accent, she says to me, and then tells us she has folks on her father’s side living in Lincolnshire (Lincoln-shy-er), England, who she keeps on meaning to look up and maybe drop in on someday?
    I wonder if she thinks Lincolnshire is somehow connected to Abraham Lincoln, and therefore partly American.
    Merilynne looks tired to me, and when she comes back carrying a tray, I’m pretty sure I know why.
    This might be the largest meal I’ve ever eaten. I can’t possibly finish the enormous pancakes, so I ask if we can take the leftovers with us, explaining that we have a dog. Makes no difference to me, says Merilynne, but not in a mean way.
    Gil pays and as we go back to our car we see Merilynne outside the diner, sitting on a step smoking a cigarette. I wonder whether she’d smoke if she knew she was pregnant. I guess she’ll find out soon enough.
    We set off again up the highway toward Canada.
    In the backseat, I open the doggy bag for Honey and find that Merilynne didn’t just empty the leftovers into a bag, but added four pieces of bacon and about a cup of corned beef hash.
For your dog,
says a handwritten note with a smiley face after it, and it’s signed
Your server Merilynne.
    Honey sniffs the bag. There are far more clues in the world for her than for any human; her sense of smell is hundreds of times keener than mine and paints whole pictures of places she hasn’t been. I nibble the end of a piece of bacon and give her the rest, then put the aluminum tray on the seat of the car and she wolfs it all down in seconds. She’s a tidy dog, clearing up crumbs with her neat pink tongue before settling down beside me with a sigh.
    My job (other than map reading) is the radio. I lean forward between the two front seats and press the scan button to find something we both want to listen to. Mostly I can find one song we like in a row and that’s it. Then there’s news. Something about Washington. Something about a church scandal. Nothing about a middle-aged man who ran away from home for no reason in the middle of the day with a class to teach on the English Civil War, leaving