He’s got everything he needs ready at the door: backpack, tent, sleeping bag. Inside the backpack is the food his mom made (oatmeal raisin cookies, turkey sandwiches on homemade bread, Greek salad). He’s also got a whole bunch of plastic grocery bags for the plants. The cottage is pretty quiet. His mom has already left for rehearsals. His father has his tools out all over the place, trying to fix the kitchen table, which finally fell apart. The weak leg finally gave out, his dad said. Just in time for a visit from Monty and Lauren.
He thinks he’s got a clear path out the front door, but just as he’s hoisting the pack on his back, his dad stops him.
“Five minutes,” Sam says. “That’s all I ask. Then you can go.”
“Shit.”
“Mouth.” His father is scowling.
“What happened to your eye, Dad?” Finn asks. His father’s got an egg over his left eye, and the skin around it is turning purple.
“I bumped it when the table fell. Listen, I want you back by eight o’clock tomorrow morning. And I need to know where you’re camping.”
“Why?”
“Don’t worry, I won’t come out there unless you’re not back in the morning.”
Finn’s skin prickles. He doesn’t want to tell him where the garden is. He doesn’t want him snooping around. Not tonight. Not any time. And so he lies. “You know that path that heads out north? The woods out there. About a hundred yards from here. I’ll be able to see the fricking house lights from my tent.”
His father nods. “Nice spot,” he says. Satisfied, Finn guesses.
“Hey, Dad. Everything okay?” he asks.
“What?”
“Just wondering if everything’s okay.”
“Sure,” his father says. “Everything’s fine.”
He’s pretty sure his dad is lying. And something about the broken table, about that new shiner makes Finn feel sort of sorry for him.
Monty knocks on the door.
“Well, have fun with Monty and the Bride of Frankenstein.” Finn thinks that this will make him laugh, but his dad looks distracted.
“Five minutes,” he says again. “Just say hi and then you can go.”
“Okay, five minutes,” Finn grumbles. “But I want to get out there so I can do some hiking first.”
He hasn’t told his father that Alice is going to meet him there. He’s pretty sure his parents wouldn’t care that she’s coming, but he doesn’t want to push his luck. Her mom knows where she’s going to be, and it’s not like they’re boyfriend/girlfriend or anything. But he knows that because of Misty they’d probably worry anyway. Plus, his mom is so weird about Alice. Both times she’s come over his mom’s acted spooked. He knows Alice reminds her of Franny. But Christ, she’s not Franny. She’s nothing like Franny.
In order to get to the garden in time to cover the plants, he needs to be there by six o’clock. He told Alice to meet him there. Now it looks like he might not be able to make it on time. He wishes his cell phone worked here. Not that it would make any difference, since she doesn’t even have a cell phone herself.
Monty is practically rattling the door off its hinges.“Sammy!”
“Welcome to the wilderness,” Sam says, ushering Monty in.
Lauren is standing quietly behind Monty, smiling a huge lipsticky smile. She’s wearing blue jeans that are so new they’re practically black. High-heeled black boots. A sleeveless sweater that looks like cashmere or something. Expensive. If she weren’t such a bitch, she’d be sort of hot, Finn thinks. She’s got short black hair and enormous tits. He’s never been able to look her in the eyes, not even when he was a kid.
She comes in and sighs. “Well, that was about the longest drive ever. But, soooo glad we’re here ... Sammy!” she says, kissing each of his dad’s cheeks, pushing her chest forward and her butt behind her. “Finn!” she squeals, and repeats the process with Finn. She smells good, like a magazine. She pulls away from him and looks him up and down. He starts to feel uncomfortable. Then she releases him dramatically. “Oh, they grow up so fast. Now where exactly is Mena again? Doing a little play with the yocals?”
“Fool for Love, the Shepard play. She’s got the lead,” Sam says.
“How darling. Fool for Love, Fool for Love.” She taps her temple with perfectly manicured plum-colored nails. “Is that a musical?”
“It’s the one about incest, Lauren,” Monty says. “Shepard. ”
“Oh.” She grimaces. “Sorry. I’m not a theater person.” Her lipstick is also the color of plums. She looks older than the last time Finn saw her.
“Come on in.” Sam motions for them to enter the cabin.
Lauren stretches her arms, shoving her chest outward again. Finn stares at his feet.
“What’s that smell?” Lauren asks, wrinkling her tiny surgery-perfected nose.
“Mena made dinner before she left. It’s spanikopita,” Sam says.
“Smells ... divine,” Lauren says, but her face is still twisted up.
Time to go. “I’m out,” Finn says, and shakes Monty’s hand.
“Sorry to put you out of your room, kid. Where you staying the night? They got a Four Seasons up here? A Ritz-Carlton?”
“They’re sending me out to the woods,” Finn says, and smiles. “Like Hansel and Gretel. I’ve got some bread crumbs in my pocket.”
“But no Gretel!” Lauren laughs.
Silence.
Everyone is horrified.
It takes her a minute. She gasps audibly. Her hand flies to her mouth with her mistake. “Oh, my God. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Train. Wreck.
“See ya,” Finn says, and heaves his backpack onto his back. And then he is jogging toward the back way to the garden, through the woods. As he runs, he keeps checking his watch, checking the sky. It’s ten until six. He hopes to God Alice is there with some more plastic bags.
When he gets to the garden, Alice is sitting on a rock, staring out at the sea of plants. The air is redolent with the smell of weed. Finn takes a deep breath, inhaling that heady scent.
“Hi!” he says, touching her shoulder. She looks weird. Her eyes are red. Her hair’s a mess. “Hey, you okay?” he asks.
“My mom wants to take me away,” she says. “Before my dad gets out next week.”
“What?” Finn asks.
“We’re going to go stay with her aunt in California.”
“California?”
“Yeah, isn’t that crazy?” Alice shakes her head. “Here you are dying to get back home, and now my mom is buying Greyhound tickets to Barstow. Is that close to San Diego? Where you live?”
Finn sits down next to her. “Not really,” he says. His heart is beating hard. He is trying to imagine being stuck here without Alice. The idea of it is incomprehensible.
Alice is playing with her shoelaces, tying and untying them. She looks up at him sadly. “I don’t want to go.”
“Then don’t go,” Finn says. His chest hurts now.
They’re both quiet for a long time. There’s a bird making a lot of noise in a tree above them. A woodpecker or something. He never realized how noisy it was out here, almost as noisy as the city. He’s racking his brain; suddenly he gets an idea. “No, wait! You can stay with us.Your dad doesn’t know who the hell we are. He wouldn’t come looking for you at our house.”
Alice shakes her head. “I’ve seen your house.You don’t have room for us.”
“We have room for you,” Finn says. He’s reaching for her now. It feels like she’ll vanish if he doesn’t hold on to her. “You can stay with me.”
She squeezes his hand, looks him in the eyes. “I can’t let my mom go by herself,” she says. She’s starting to cry, and he doesn’t know what to do. “I have to take care of her.”
Finn can feel his throat growing thick. He concentrates, makes his mind go empty. It’s the only way to hold it together.
After a while of just sitting there, holding hands, Finn says, “You’re going to miss the harvest.”
“I’m going to miss you,” she says, wiping the tears with the back of her wrist.
Monty starts in right away. “So, when do I get to take a peek at the next Pulitzer-winning novel, Sammy?”
They are both on their second pieces of spanikopita. Lauren had pushed hers around her plate several times and then grabbed an orange from the bowl in the middle of the table. Sam had managed to temporarily fix both the broken fruit bowl and the table leg, but he’s pretty sure they won’t hold out for long. Their dinner, as a matter of fact, might just wind up on the floor. Lauren is sitting next to Monty peeling the orange, scrutinizing a brown patch on the skin. The whole cabin smells like citrus and spinach.
“You know me, Monty. I like to have a good draft before I let it out loose in the world. It’s just a bunch of scattered notes right now; it’s a mess.”
“I’ve been talking to Frank over at Random House. He says they’re thinking about giving him his own imprint. Of course, he may be blowing steam out his ass, but I’ve heard a few things, and I think it might be true. Anyway, we were just talking about you. Really about Small Sorrows, and he was raving about you, asking, What ever happened to that Sam Mason? He should have gotten a National Book Award for that one. I did have to remind him about the nomination for The Art of Hunting, mind you, but he’s a fan. A big one, and I have a feeling he might pay a lot of money to get his grubby paws on the next Sam Mason book. After this one, of course.”
Sam cannot even begin to think of a book after this book, or whatever the hell it is he’s working on.
“I met his wife,” Lauren nods. “She’s a publicist. So well-connected; I bet we could get her on board too. After everything, you know, you’re probably going to need a good publicist. Put a good spin on things.” She’s peeled the orange now and has dissected it into segments. He’s pretty sure she hasn’t eaten a single one of them. There’s a pit in his gut, and he imagines it like an orange seed, planting itself in the bile and trash inside his stomach, growing, blooming and blossoming, filling his body.
“Can you give me a hint?” Monty asks.
“Jesus, Monty. Let it alone for five minutes so I can eat?” Sam is trying to be lighthearted about this, but he’s getting pissed.
Monty keeps pushing. “Just the premise. The main character. Can you give me something to chew on?”
Sam sets his fork down hard on the rickety table. He thinks about Mena’s fist striking his face. The skin still stings. “Christ, Monty, it’s about a starvation experiment,” he says, and then immediately regrets it.
Lauren’s jaw drops. She looks like one of those wooden ventriloquist’s mannequins.
“Close your mouth, Laur,” Monty says. And then he is nodding, his head bobbing like a bobblehead doll.
Sam rubs his temples. He’s gone too far to go back now. “It’s not what you think. I mean, it’s not some god-awful memoir or anything.”
Monty is still bobbing his head; Sam suddenly realizes that he actually looks excited. Eager.
“It’s about these men, conscientious objectors during World War II. They volunteered for this experiment, to be starved and then refed. I’ve only got about ten pages. And to be honest, I’m not sure if it’s anything anyone will ever want to read. Monty, you and I have been in this business a long time. I know what it is that publishers want these days. They want the big guns. The heavy hitters. Or, they want some pretty little girl, some Harvard coed protégée. Or some fucking drug addict who rambles on for a thousand pages about how he overcame his addictions. I’m small potatoes, Monty. A relic.”
“That’s not true, Sam,” Lauren wines, a mock frown.
“It is true, Lauren. Don’t tell me you didn’t tell all your Colony Club friends that Monty was dragging you up to Butt Fuck Nowhere this weekend to see one of his has-been clients.”
“That’s enough, Sam.You’re just in a slump.You’ve had some big stuff happen. Some really shitty shit happen,” Monty says.
“I may not even want to publish it,” Sam says. “Maybe I’m just writing it for me.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Monty says, laughing. “It’s finally happened. That’s what this Vermont business is about, isn’t it? You came up here to Salinger yourself away. A fucking hermit, writing away, stashing your work in some fucking wall safe somewhere.” Monty looks around the room as if he’s going to find Sam’s hidden treasures behind a picture on the wall.
“Ten pages, Monty. And every single one of them is a piece of shit.” Sam stands up and rests his hands on the table’s edge. He thinks of Mena. It’s our fault, she said. It’s your fault. He can still feel the place where her finger met his chest. “I didn’t come here to write. I came here to save my fucking family from falling apart. What’s left of it anyway.” His voice is booming now; he can feel his face getting red, his ears are hot. He grips the edge of the table, almost willing the whole thing to just fucking collapse.
“Well then,” Lauren says quietly to Monty. And then to Sam, “I need to use your restroom.”
Sam sighs and gestures down the hall.
After she has closed the bathroom door, Monty says, “I’m sorry about this, buddy.You want us to go?” His voice is full of sympathy. He’s been a good friend. Sam feels like shit for disappointing him.
“If you’re here for a book, I just don’t have it, Monty.”
“That’s not why I’m here,” Monty says.
“If you want to go home, go home,” Sam says. “If you leave now, you can get back to the city just past midnight.This was a bad idea. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not over, Sammy. You just need to get through this rough patch.You’re a writer. That’s not going to change.”
“Monty, I don’t even want to write anymore. I just don’t even care. I never thought I’d say that, but it’s just gone. Everything that drove me to sit down and work every day, that excitement, that passion, has vanished. It’s excruciating. It’s literally painful to work. I’m spent.”
“I believe in you,” Monty says. “Just give it time.”
“Ten pages in the last six months, Monty. How long am I supposed to wait?”
Lauren emerges from the bathroom, her cheeks flushed pink, a fresh coat of lipstick on her puffy lips. “I saw a motel on our way here,” she says, clapping her hands together. “Maybe we can take you and Mena out for breakfast tomorrow or something.” And those Botoxed lips pull down into a pity frown. “You look thin.”
Lauren gets in the car without saying a word to Sam. Monty shakes his hand and then hugs him at the door.
“Oh shit,” he says. “I forgot to give you this. They’ve been piling up. It’s about six months’ worth.” He reaches into his bag and pulls out a bulging manila envelope. “Fan mail,” Monty says. “Don’t tell me your career’s over. At least the women still love you.”
Dale had left Buffalo at 6:00 A.M., but the drive to Quimby took ten hours. She pulled off the interstate and into town at 4:00, exhausted. She’d cried almost the whole way there. Without the printouts, she had no idea how to get to Lake Gormlaith. It wasn’t on any of the maps she found at the Vermont Welcome Center. She kept checking the rearview mirror. For about an hour there was a Suburban behind her with tinted windows. Whenever she slowed down, it slowed down.When she sped up, it did as well. She lost it finally when she pulled into a rest area.
She parked the car in the dirt parking lot of a diner and took a deep breath. Okay, okay.You’re almost there.You’ve come three thousand miles. Just calm down. Eat something. Come up with a plan. There had to be a place where she could get Internet access here. She’d just print out some new maps. Get up early tomorrow and find the lake. She just needed to get to Sam, and he’d make everything okay.
The bells on the door jingled as she entered the diner, and the smells embraced her. The chalkboard sign said, PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF, and so she chose a two-person booth by the window.
She grabbed a laminated menu from the rack behind the bowl of individual creamers
and scanned the breakfast (Served All Day) items.The waitress, Maggie according to her name tag, took her order—a skillet breakfast (bacon, eggs, hash browns, biscuits and sausage gravy) and a Mountain Dew—and within minutes there was a steaming plate in front of her. She was starving; she had to make herself slow down, take small bites. It was so delicious, she felt her eyes growing wet with each forkful.
When her stomach was full, and the caffeine had kicked in, she felt rejuvenated.
“Excuse me?” she said, motioning for Maggie to come over.
“Can I getcha something else?”
She considered asking her how to get to Gormlaith, but then figured she should be careful. She had no idea who was watching her; maybe this Maggie was one of them. “I was actually wondering if you knew of a place where I could get Internet access around here. I need to check my e-mail,” she added.
“Library’s probably the only place,” Maggie said. “I’ve got a friend who works over there. Do you want me to give her a call and see how late they’re open tonight?”
“No, that’s okay. I can drive. Where is it exactly? I’m not from here.”
Maggie gave her directions to the Athenaeum on a napkin. “My friend’s name is Effie,” Maggie said. “You tell her I sent you.”
Dale got in her car and headed out of the parking lot.
She pulled up in front of the library just as a tiny woman with a long black braid was locking the heavy front doors to the building.
Dale threw open the door of the Bug and raced up the steps. Breathless, she said, “Hi, your friend Maggie at the diner said I might be able to get Internet access here? Are you closed?”
The woman smiled. “Shoot, I’d let you in, but our server’s down. We haven’t had access all day. This happens about twice a week,” she said. “We’re open tomorrow at noon though, and the guy who takes care of our computers will have been in by then.”
Dale’s heart thumped heavily in her chest. Her lip quivered.
The Hungry Season Page 20
