Off Course by Michelle Huneven Page B

Cress,
    Greetings from Hampstead! I hope Mom and Dad give you this. I didn’t know how to send it to the cabin, so I just enclosed it with their letter—(hahaha, Mom, you old snooper, I’m onto you). I have left Cairo (that HELLHOLE!!!) and am back living in London. You have to come visit! I’m hoping to buy a flat, but in the meantime, I’ve rented a tiny bedsit on a picturesque square—you can almost imagine horses and carriages parked on the street. I bought a not-too-lumpy old couch just for you and anyone else I can lure here.
    I couldn’t believe it when Mom said you were living at the cabin—I thought you hated it up there!!! I sure did. (Sorry, old snoop, but it’s the truth! Captives have few fond memories of prison, Frau Warden.) I remember how every Saturday I’d walk down to the lodge and buy the big package of Hydrox cookies, then walk out to the Crags or Globe Rock and sit under a tree and read Irving Stone novels, and eat each cookie in three stages, wafer-filling-wafer, until they were all gone. I’d stay out till the sun set. Nobody ever, ever asked me where I went. (No, Snoopy, you never did. Not once.) (Sorry for all the asides, Cressie. Mom used to read my diaries so I just assume she’ll read this.) Luckily, I wasn’t eaten by a mountain lion or raped by Big Foot. Anyway, good luck up there.
    Once you get your thesis written, you can celebrate with … a London vacation! So hurry up.
    Cheerio, old chap,
    Sharon
    Alone again, Cress drew trees, rocks, and dirt and thought in long, circular whorls. (Rocks were hard; the more she looked at them, the more specific and abstract they became.) The plaint of country music fed a thickening strand of yearning. Now that she saw him less often—and wondered if she’d ever see him again—Jakey looped constantly through her thoughts. She wanted, or thought she wanted, what any lover does: access on demand to that cozy furnace of a body and centrality in his life—unlike now, when she ranged, wineglass in hand, while 1.2 miles away he roared at strangers and knee-nudged his neighbors.
    â€œCall him,” said Tillie. “Better yet, go get him. How does he know you’re interested if you play it so cool?”
    How interested was she, really? More than their prospects merited. She’d never marry or even live with him, but the thought of him bearing down on her in his cheap white shirt, the whole hot juicy weight of him, stopped her breath.
    Two glasses of burgundy and what the hell, she phoned the lodge, ready to leave a message. Jakey picked up. The background music and laughter were loud for a weeknight. “It’s me,” she said. “Feel like coming up?”
    â€œYou bet!” he barked. “Soon as I can get away.”
    She put away her pastels. She drank another glass of wine. She fed the fire and walked outside onto the front deck. The Milky Way, that big galactic smudge, hogged the black sky. The wind gathered, heaved, and ceased; gathered, heaved, and ceased. Headlights flashed through the trees and did not turn up her driveway. It was fall, the world was dusty, pinched, dying back. She was not really writing or drawing, or even steeping herself in the beauty of the natural world. She was waiting for Jakey. She was waiting all the time now, suspended in the hours, poised, nose quivering in the air. Another car rounded the curve and relief rushed in. But that car, and all the others passing by that night, never turned her way.
    *   *   *
    She went a little frantic then and fought an almost constant urge to go to the lodge, to call Jakey, to locate him. So this is what he did to the bims. She held off, for pride’s sake. She used the back way into the Meadows—a narrow road half a mile west of the lodge—so he wouldn’t see her come and go. She avoided walking or driving past his house. She avoided the phone, and the A-frame