The Hungry Season

by Greenwood, T.

  And later, he brought his own kids here. Finn would disappear into the basement, and Sam and Franny would wander the stacks together. When she was very small, they would play hide-and-seek in the library, quietly so they didn’t get caught. And then when she was old enough to read, she’d carry as many books as her arms could hold to the room with the cozy couches. They’d sit together, her feet curled up underneath her or her head buried into the crook of his arm.

  Effie greets him at the giant double doors to the library. It is after hours, but there is a faint glow of pale peach-colored light coming from inside.

  “I’m early,” he says, by way of apology, glancing at his watch even though he knows he’s not due for another fifteen minutes. He’s always been like this, too eager. Never late, not even punctual, but chronically early.

  “Oh, that’s fine. Just fine. I hope this is okay,” she says, ushering him into the library and gesturing toward the reading room.

  Effie has arranged a semicircle of folding chairs around the fireplace and put an overstuffed wingback chair in front of the hearth. “It looks like Masterpiece Theatre,” he says.

  Effie laughs.

  He can see that some of the book club members have already taken their seats.There is one woman rifling through her purse and another clutching a library copy of Small Sorrows. There is also an elderly man with a handlebar mustache dressed in overalls reading The Wall Street Journal. The other seats are still empty.

  “Can I get you something? Tea? Coffee? Water?”

  “Coffee would be great,” he says, though he knows better. He’ll be up all night. But the coffee that’s bubbling in a pot near the circulation desk smells good.

  “I used to come here,” he says. “When I was growing up. My kids used to come too. But Finn ... I don’t think he’s seen the inside of a library in years.” He doesn’t know why he’s sharing this with her.

  He thinks about the way the pages felt as he smoothed the books open on the table next to his father. The purity of those moments alone with his dad. He is overwhelmed by a sense of something lost. So many things lost. His father. Franny. The emptiness that is ever present, a permanent ache. But this is new, this feeling that he has let something else slip. Finn. Mena. It’s like dropping a china plate: first alarm, then regret, then just a sense of everything being shattered.

  “What made you think of writing about a missing girl?” the woman sitting closest to him asks. She is wearing a thick, heady perfume. She leans in close for his answer, and he can hear the hum of her hearing aid.

  “It started with a dream,” he says, speaking up so she can hear him. “When my children were still small. I had a dream where I was walking through the woods at night and suddenly arrived at the edge of a murky pond. In the water, I saw a child, floating in her nightgown. I woke up and knew that I needed to find out what had happened to her. How she came to be there.”

  What he doesn’t tell them, the eager readers thumbing furiously through their copies of his novel, is that in the dream he’d seen the child’s face, and it belonged to Franny. That he thought if he wrote the words they might act as some sort of magic spell, an incantation, an inoculation against the unthinkable. What he doesn’t say is that he knew, long before it happened, that they were destined to lose her.

  Mena doesn’t need a recipe for this; making bread is simply something her hands know how to do. It is intuitive. Like reading, like riding a bicycle, like comforting an infant with the sway of your body and the hush of your words. It’s something that once you learn, becomes a part of you. Intrinsic.

  She watches her hands, wonders at the way they turn all of the separate ingredients into a living, breathing thing. This is how she thinks of bread, as something alive. The loaves she has already prepared inhale and exhale beneath dish towels on the counter. She watches her hands turn the oil, the honey, the cool milk into the flour and yeast and salt.

  These are her mother’s hands.

  She remembers waking up before sunrise as a child and finding her mother in their small kitchen, coaxing life into dough. Mena would sit on an old dentist stool dragged from her father’s workshop. She would spin it around and around until it was high enough to see over the counter. She and her mother never spoke those mornings. Sometimes, she would even fall back to sleep, her head resting on the counter, dusty with flour, while her mother kneaded and pounded and then waited for the dough to rise. Her mother’s hands: long fingers, olive skin, the gold key-patterned ring, identical, but smaller, than the one her father wore. The dough would sometimes imbed itself into the grooves. Into the meandros, that continuous wandering pattern that wound its way around her slim finger.

  Sam had bought a set of rings nearly identical to her parents’ after he proposed. He found them in an antique shop in Ocean Beach. The pattern was supposed to symbolize unity, infinity. Mena thinks of her mother when her father was sick, in those terrible last days, the way she would twirl it around with the thumb of the same hand, working her thumb against her palm, the band spinning around and around her finger. She remembers how at her father’s funeral, her mother held the back of her hand to her face, running the ring across her cheek again and again, comforting herself as she might a child. And later, after the MS crippled her hands and she could no longer make bread, the way the ring blistered her fingers. And still, she refused to remove it.

  Mena looks at her hands, at her mother’s hands, watches them as they push and prod and persuade. She studies the grooves of her own ring, that continuous, uninterrupted yet circuitous path. And she thinks of Sam, so unlike her own father. Her father with his temper and rages. With the way he took and took and took from her mother and never once gave back. Her father with his violence and dismissal. And yet, her mother felt bound. Tethered. Even after his death. She remembers her mother’s defending him even after he no longer needed her defense. You remember how he would carry you on his shoulders, paidi mou? All through the kitchen, you banging your head on the ceiling? Remember the music? Remember the way we all stomped our feet? And it was true, Mena could remember when her father came home hours after the workday had ended, how he would sing,“Tick-tock! Tick-tock! Papa’s home from the clock shop!” lifting her up onto his shoulders and marching her about the kitchen. There was a smell to him she always assumed was whatever he’d been drinking at Joe’s Place, the bar next to his shop, but later understood to be the smell of another woman’s perfume. She even went to Dillard’s once in high school, desperate to find that smell, to locate a bottle filled with the tincture that she could offer to her mother as evidence that she deserved better. That she should leave him. But she hadn’t been able to locate that scent and left the store feeling dizzy and nauseous. Sickened by the citrus and sweetness and musk.

  Mena kneads and kneads and thinks of Sam, who is so even-keeled and predictable, reliable and faithful. She feels guilty even thinking about how far away she feels from him now. How much she wishes he would drink too much, throw open the door, yell. Blame someone, blame her. How much she would welcome a slap across the face. Something, anything to prove that he is alive. Anger. Joy. Sorrow. It’s all gone now, and he is like the husks of the cicadas that littered her backyard as a child. Transparent and hollow. Fragile.

  She works the dough into the wooden butcher block, pressing her palms into it as it resists. She looks to the loaves, swaddled in their gingham cloths, watches as they grow. They have taken on a life of their own.

  Dale is driving toward Memphis, and the heat, like an apparition, hovers over the pavement in front of her. The heat is unbearable; her thighs stick to the vinyl seats of the Bug, adhered by sweat. She shifts, rolls down the window, puts her hand out and touches the hot air, suffocating and oppressive, clinging and cloying outside. The jug of water at her feet is already hot. The candy bars she stashed in the glove box have melted. She has only been on the road for a couple of hours this morning, but already she is wondering again if she might be making a terrible mistake. She is ne
aring Little Rock, and she thinks of stopping there, finding a motel for the night, and then turning back home. When she left Oklahoma City this morning, she felt such a tremendous sense of purpose, such conviction, and so she is surprised to find herself feeling this deflated.

  Piece of shit five-hundred-dollar car. What did she expect? The brakes, despite what Thoreau said, are iffy, the windshield wipers don’t work (not even with the shoe strings), and she can see the pavement running under her feet through the rusted hole in the baseboard. She’s starting to wonder if it will survive the trip.The radio in the car is broken, but at least the tape player works, and she’s got a shoe box full of audio books she bought when her last student loan check came in. She’d used what was left after tuition to buy that first-edition, signed copy of The Hour of Lead on eBay and audio tapes of the rest of Sam’s novels. There are eight altogether. She figures she might get across the country, all the way to Vermont even, before she gets through them all. Of course it isn’t him reading them, but she thinks that the actor who read The Hour of Lead sounds a little bit like him, with that voice like fallen leaves.When she thinks of Vermont, she dreams of cool pine trees and chill waters of a deep lake. His words pull her into a world that doesn’t stink of gasoline, of diesel, of grease.Where the Circle Ks and Home Depots and IHOPS are flattened into the pristine green of unoccupied land. She wants this almost as much as she wants to get to him. Almost.

  There are no other cars on this stretch of highway, only the occasional semi that whizzes past her, making the Bug tremble and list toward the center line. She reaches into the box on the passenger seat and grabs the first one (she figures she’ll go in order) and pops it into the player. There is a pause, and then the story begins, the gravelly voice of the actor speaking softly, This is the hour of lead. I remember, because I am the one who lived. She closes her eyes, just for a moment, and feels his words quiver against her. By the time she opens her eyes again, her resolve is restored. She grips the steering wheel, flashes a bright smile at herself in the small rearview mirror, and pushes the accelerator.

  She’s thinking of a conversation she had with her mother once about her own visit to Memphis, trying to get to Graceland, back before Dale was born. She and a girlfriend from high school drove all the way there, only for her to get sick on some bad catfish in Arkansas along the way. Her girlfriend went on without her, and while her friend toured Elvis’s mansion, she spent the entire day clinging to the motel toilet. She said bad catfish was worse than mayonnaise left out in the sun all day. Graceland is one of her mother’s many, many unfulfilled dreams. Dale figures she can take the time to stop—it is on the way—and pick up some sort of trinket to send home. A bobblehead Elvis, maybe. A Graceland thimble for her mother’s collection.

  She can’t get the Bug to go over fifty-five mph though, so it’s taking her forever. She stays in the far right lane and envies the more swiftly moving traffic that passes by her. It’s still hotter than hell, and she thinks maybe she should stop somewhere to buy a cooler to keep her sodas and candy bars cold. Just past Little Rock, she goes to a gas station and gets pointed in the direction of the nearest Walmart.

  The car is hot. She is hot. Outside the air is as thick as corn syrup and smells like tar. She wonders about leaving all of her prized possessions inside a car that won’t lock. She’s been able to avoid this so far by going to full-service gas stations and eating at drive-thrus. She’s got a pretty big bladder and has only had to stop once or twice to pee. Both times she asked the friendly looking cashiers if they might just keep an eye on her car while she ran into the restroom.

  She decides she’ll risk it; she’s not sure how much longer she can survive without something cold to drink, and she doesn’t want to have to keep stopping just to get fresh sodas. She grabs her backpack and stuffs in the important papers she has with her, the signed first edition of The Hour of Lead, and the photos she’s printed off the Internet. Her laptop. She closes the door to the car and half walks half runs to the sliding doors, feeling the hot pavement through the thin rubber soles of her flip-flops. When she gets to the store, there’s a little kid sitting on one of those coin-operated fire truck rides and he’s screeching at the top of his lungs, “Fire! Fire!” She smiles at him, and he keeps screaming. “Fire!” He’s really into this, she thinks. And then his mother, who’s talking on her cell, looks up and says into the phone,“Holy shit, there’s a car on fire at the Walmart!”

  Dale turns toward the parking lot and sees a big puff of smoke coming from the area where she left the car. And then she quickly realizes that there are flames leaping out from the engine of the Bug.

  “Oh, my God!” she screams, and then starts running back to the car. She stands there for a minute, looking around her, feeling helpless. “Help!” she screams, and wonders why she didn’t have the sense to tell the woman with the phone to call 9-1-1.

  It feels like forever that she’s standing there watching the Bug’s rear end become engulfed in flames. She wonders if she should run into the Walmart and get a fire extinguisher. And then, like a miracle, there’s a guy running from the store toward the car with a fire extinguisher, and he pushes her out of the way. “I got it,” he says.

  When the fire is extinguished and the Bug covered with foam, the man, who reminds her a little of the guy who sold her the car, shakes his head as if to scold her. “Piece of shit German car.”

  She nods, feels her bottom lip quivering, trying hard not to cry.

  “These things always catch on fire. Probably the cap to the fuel filter broke, so frickin’ hot, wouldn’t take much, just a little spark. Oil all over the engine, s’like a frickin’ rag soaked in gasoline.” He pats her back. “Lady, looks like your car’s shit the bed.”

  She can’t hold it in any longer. She starts to cry, big embarrassing sobs. She sits down on the hot pavement, feels it searing the backs of her thighs, and she cries until her throat hurts. She’s sure she’s making more of a spectacle of herself than a burning car in the middle of a Walmart parking lot.

  When she hasn’t got any tears left, she looks up and sees the guy’s still there. He’s leaning against the Bug, smoking a cigarette. He has the shadow of a beard, a small hole in the hem of his T-shirt. “Here comes the fire department.” He chuckles. “Just in time.”

  The tow truck driver takes one look at it and says, “Piece of shit German car.”

  She nods again, ashamed. She’s standing with her suitcase and her shoe box of Books on Tape and the other box of stuff from the trunk and the afghan her grandmother made her. The guy who put the fire out has hung around. He said his name was Troy, and he’d wait with her until the tow truck came. “You think it can be fixed?” she asks.

  The tow guy, who has a meaty red face and sweat stains like saucers, shrugs. “Ain’t nothing that can’t be fixed. Anything can be fixed. Just a matter of how long it’s gonna take. And if you got insurance or not. Usually fire’s covered under your comprehensive.”

  “I do,” she says. “Have insurance.”

  “Then it’s just a question of how much time you got, I guess.”

  She swallows past a lump in her throat. “I’m trying to get to Vermont. I was hoping to be there by the end of the week.”

  He laughs a big hearty laugh. “Listen,” he says. “I’ll bring this to my brother’s shop. Depending how busy he is, I figure it’s probably gonna take at least three or four days to fix whatever damage you got inside the engine. If you want the body fixed too, you might be looking at a week or more.”

  She starts to feel hot and buzzing, and she’s worried she might pass out.

  The other guy, Troy, says, “I know a place you can rent by the week, real cheap. Unless you think you wanna take a bus the rest of the way? Greyhounds go all the way up there?”

  Dale tries to shake away the vertigo, concentrating on the feeling of her two feet firmly planted on the very hot ground beneath her. “I need to have a car.”

  “Alrighty then,” Troy
says. “You stay until it’s ready. Problem solved.”

  He’d seen it coming, but it still felt awful. After Misty hadn’t answered her phone for a whole week, Finn wrote her a postcard. It had a photo of a big red barn and cows in a field on the front. Dear Misty, he scrawled. He didn’t want to say anything he’d regret. What’s up? Haven’t heard from you and thought I’d drop you a note from the land of BFN. Weather is rainy. Wish you were here, all that shit. Miss you, he started and quickly crossed it out. XO, Finn.

  “Listen,” she said softly, a few days later.

  He took the phone out of the cabin as far as he could and still get reception, sat down on the wood pile by the barn, and waited.

  “I’ve been thinking that maybe it would be a good idea if we, before I leave for school ...” Her voice trailed off.

  “If we what, Misty?” he said, peeling a piece of bark from one of the birch logs. It was like stripping off a layer of sunburned skin.

  He could tell she just wanted to get off the phone. She sighed. “You know, maybe we should just focus on our friendship.”

  He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t have gotten words past the thick knot in his throat if he’d wanted to.

  “I mean, I’m leaving for college in like a month, and you’re all the way up there. I don’t even know if I’m going to get to see you before I leave.” He could picture her, sitting on the edge of her bed, painting her toenails, talking but not really talking, like a ventriloquist’s dummy ... saying all the things she was supposed to say, just waiting to get off the phone and get back to her life.