The Hungry Season by T. Greenwood Read Free Book Online Page A

hope in her eyes for months. It was contagious. “This will be good,” she said. “For us. A fresh start.”
    And then she was slipping out of her clothes, letting her jeans pool around her feet. Pulling the soft white T-shirt smudged with newsprint from packing over her head. He let her undress him; he wasn’t even sure how it was that they used to do this. How long had it been? How long had they managed to keep from touching each other? It used to be that they couldn’t stop.
    As she buried her face in his neck, her hair soft in his face, she reached down into his shorts and touched him. Tentatively.
    There must be a word for this, he thought then. There must be a way to describe this old touch, this familiar hand and the softness of fingerprints. But he couldn’t find it, nothing.
    She tried, whispering her own words on his neck. But after a few minutes, she withdrew her hand from his limp penis as if she’d been burned. “We’ve got an early morning tomorrow,” she said, blinking hard, climbing back into her T-shirt and into the bed.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. When he crawled in next to her he should have reached over and held her, but he was too ashamed, and so instead he rolled onto his side and shut his eyes.
     
    After breakfast, Mena leaves to go to the grocery store, and Sam surveys the yard from the window. It looks like some god-awful jungle out there. Feeling suddenly full of purpose, he goes out to the shed and finds the lawn mower behind a bunch of rusty lawn chairs. He gives it a few good yanks, but it’s dead. Finn is pouting in his room, waiting for the good people at AT&T to come and connect him to the world again. Mena had offered him a phone card at breakfast. “They’ll be here between two and five.You can use the phone then.”
    Sam stands in the knee-high weeds and wonders if one of the neighbors has a mower he can borrow.
    Inside the cabin, he hollers down the hall to the bedrooms, “Going for a walk!” But when he pushes Finn’s door open, he sees that Finn has fallen asleep again, curled up into a tight ball. His impulse is to go to him, brush the mop of white blond curls out of his eyes. But instead he just stands in the doorway, leaning against the woodwork for support.
    When the twins were little, he could never leave them alone when they were sleeping. He would check on them two, sometimes three times a night. “Let them sleep, ” Mena would say, as he slowly opened their door again. They slept curled around each other, holding hands, little feet tangled. Intertwined the way they probably had been inside Mena’s womb. When he couldn’t see the blankets rising and falling with their breaths, he would feel a sort of urgent rush of blood in his temples, and he would go to them, press his large flat palms or his ear against their tiny chests until he could confirm first one and then two heartbeats. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night in a panic and he would check again.
    He starts down the road, sure that Finn will be out for another hour or more. He knows he has trouble sleeping at night. At home, Sam could see the green glow of his desk lamp under the door all through the night. Finn had become nocturnal, staying up all night and then crashing after school and through the weekends.
    Most of the camps are still empty.The summer people usually don’t come until the Fourth of July, which is still a week away. The blackflies are the primary residents this time of year. When he was a kid, his dad would bring him here to go fishing, back before the lake’s peace had been disturbed by summer folks’ powerboats and water-skiers. He’d hated the blackflies that filled his ears and flew up his nose, but he loved being with his father out on the empty lake. They’d sit there for hours, with their lines the only interruption in the still surface of the water. They didn’t talk much. There wasn’t any need then for words.
    He wonders if Finn would agree to go fishing