She shrugged. “They want you to have it.” In truth, they had offered it to her as well—to both of them—but she’d rejected the idea immediately. She couldn’t stay in Midden. Their offer had crystallized that fact in her mind. “You and Lisa and Iris can live in the apartment upstairs. Or you could rent it out for money if it’s not big enough for you.”
“But you live there.”
“Not for too much longer, Josh.” She waved her hand into the new grass that grew at the edge of the blanket and pulled a blade of it from the ground. “I think I’ll work through Labor Day while the money’s good, but then I have to move on.”
“Back to the Cities?”
“I don’t know.” She shredded the blade of grass into tiny pieces, pondering the question. “Maybe. I could go somewhere else too.” She looked up at him and smiled. “Somewhere new to go off and seek my fortune,” she said in an intentionally dramatic voice.
“You should,” he said, earnestly.
“Yeah,” she said, though her stomach flipped with the notion. She flung the strings of grass away from her, but the wind blew them back, scattering them over her and Joshua.
“You’re too smart to be staying here, that’s for sure. You need to go and be around other smart people.”
“I am around smart people, Josh. Smart people live in Midden. You’re smart,” she said, emphatically. When she said it, she realized she’d never told him that. She wondered if anyone ever had.
“You know what I mean.”
“No,” she protested gently, but she did. She would always be from here, of here, but she could not stay here. She remembered how it felt to walk down the streets of Minneapolis the way she used to, yearning and yearning. For what, she didn’t precisely know. Since her mother died that unknowingness had felt to her like a weakness, a hopeless surrender, instead of the glorious question it had been before, back when she was a daughter, a girl. She watched an empty plastic milk jug float past in the river, washed in by the high water, and tried to let the question return.
“Well, Iris is going to miss you. I can tell you that right now.”
A tender urge rose in her to take his hand and hold it the way she held it when she went to visit him in jail, but she didn’t. It would seem strange now, out here in the real world, where love had the luxury of being diffused and sheltered from itself. They sat together for several minutes in silence. Wispy white clouds appeared above them, blocking the sun for moments at a time.
“So, what do you think of taking over the bar?”
“I think it’s interesting.”
“I thought so too. It could be a good thing for you and Lisa and Iris.”
“It could,” he agreed. She could see the thoughts moving across his face as the idea set in. He leaned back on his hands and gazed at the sky and in that gesture Claire could see his excitement and joy, his amazement and relief.
“Would you live upstairs or would you rent it?”
He was silent for several moments and then he turned to her abruptly and said, “I used to live there.”
“I know,” she replied, not certain of what he was telling her, wanting to let him do it on his own.
“No. I mean, not with you and Mom. I lived there by myself when Mom was sick and for a while afterwards. Nobody knew about it. I sort of broke in.”
“Len knew.” She watched the surprise ripple over his face. “He told me about it the night before Mom died, when I was looking all over for you. I called Len and he said to go to the apartment and you’d be there, so I did, but you weren’t. Your truck wasn’t here, so that’s when I went out to the lake.”
“I always parked my truck in town,” he said. “Otherwise Len and Mardell would know I was here. I would park behind the café and walk down.”
“Oh,” she said, understanding it now. “Of course. How dumb am I?” She laughed, though a bird of pain fluttered into her chest, the entire memory coming to her with a sting. Of course he wouldn’t have parked here, she realized now, though it hadn’t occurred to her then, in the depths of her grief and fear. If only she had ascended the stairs and knocked, then they would have been there with their mother when she died. They wouldn’t have sat for hours on a frozen lake, mired in the ice. They wouldn’t have driven the highway to Duluth so fast it made her shake in terror, all to no avail.
“I’m sorry, Claire.”
He tried to get her to look at him, but she wouldn’t. She stared at her shoes or else she would cry. She’d forgiven him months before, but she couldn’t tell him about it yet.
“It seems like we’re both doing okay,” she said instead.
He nodded. “We’re moving on.”
Claire remained silent, not wanting to agree or admit that that was what she’d been doing. Moving on, moving away, moving forward and beyond, past her mother. My mother, my mother, my mother, she said silently to herself. How much she missed her mother.
“Do you remember how we used to play Blue River Piss Off?” Joshua asked.
“Yeah,” she said, a smile spreading across her face.
“We were funny.”
“We were.”
“I used to still do it. All the way up until—I don’t know—not very long ago. I used to skip school and come out here and sit by the river and get stoned and then I’d put stuff in the river and I’d think, Blue River Piss Off.”
“It’s funny, the way things stay with you.” She stared at the water. A jagged branch floated by. She remembered putting the lilac boughs in the river when Bruce and her mother had taken their commitment vows. “So why’d you stop?” she asked Joshua.
He shrugged. “I suppose I grew up.” He thought for a while longer and then turned to her. “Iris was born in Blue River. Maybe that was it.”
“We don’t want Blue River to piss off anymore!” Claire hollered comically to the sky and the trees and the rock and the river itself, as if they would hear and forgive them. And then a hush settled over them all, as if they had heard, had forgiven.
She unzipped the pocket of her coat and took the packets of seeds out and handed one to Joshua. They walked to the river and ripped the packets open and poured the seeds into their palms and then bent down and plunged their hands into the icy water, letting the seeds wash away. Their hands appeared whiter, more fragile than they were, almost glowing beneath the surface of the water as the current moved past them, through them, making rivulets along their fingers.
“Teresa Rae Wood,” Claire said softly, slowly, like a secret, like a sacrament, like a prayer.
“Teresa Rae Wood,” Joshua said after her.
Those three words were a flame, a torch they would carry forever.
They shook the water from their hands and stood watching the river. Claire was thinking what Joshua was thinking, she knew without having to ask, without even having to so much as look at his face.
They were thinking what they would do now: be incredible. Like most people.
Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed is the author of Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar and Wild. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, The Rumpus, Self, The Missouri Review, The Sun, and The Best American Essays. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Also by Cheryl Strayed
Tiny Beautiful Things
Wild
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Cheryl Strayed
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike: Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling story of a lifetime.
“So vivid, sharp and compelling that you feel the heat of the desert, the frigid ice of the High Sierra and the breathtaking power of one remarkable woman finding her way—and herself—one brave step at a time.”
—People,
Available in hardcover and eBook from Knopf
Please visit CherylStrayed.com
ALSO BY CHERYL STRAYED
tiny beautiful things
advice on love and life from Dear Sugar
Follow Cheryl Strayed on her next journey, as Sugar: the wildly popular (and once-anonymous) online columnist thousands have turned to for all kinds of advice. Her answers—rich with humor, compassion, and absolute honesty—will surprise, delight, and inspire you. Tiny Beautiful Things brings the best of Dear Sugar together in one place for the first time, and includes never-before-published columns: it’s an essential guide for everything life throws your way.
“Charming, idiosyncratic, luminous, profane.… Sugar is the ultimate advice columnist for the internet age.… She shines out amid the sea of fakeness.”
—The New Republic
“These pieces are nothing short of dynamite.”
—Salon
“Men and women of all ages contact Sugar hoping she can solve their problems.… Her Golden Rule—‘Trust Yourself’—pushes the author and her readers to embrace themselves and not be afraid of asking life’s complex questions.… A realistic and poignant compilation of the intricacies of relationships.”
—Kirkus
“Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start there.”
“Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
“Nobody will protect you from your suffering.”
“Be brave enough to break your own heart.”
“Believe that the fairy tale is true.”
“Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts.”
“Every last one of us can do better than give up.”
“The only way out of a hole is to climb out.”
a vintage original
Available July 2012 everywhere books are sold
Please visit CherylStrayed.com
Cheryl Strayed, Torch
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