Free The Sweetness of Salt by Cecilia Galante Page B

her!” she screamed, arms waving out in front. “Don’t you touch her, Sophie!”
    Sophie straightened up. She stepped back as Mom grabbed me and held me against the front of her. Mom’s breath was coming in little spurts, as if she couldn’t catch it fast enough, and behind me I could feel her legs shaking.
    “Don’t worry,” Sophie said in a strange voice. “I’m not going to hurt her.”
    I could hear her behind me as she turned and walked back into her room.
    And then, inside the safety of Mom’s arms, the slam of her door.

chapter
    15
    I got lost in Albany after stopping at a Burger King for dinner. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I thought, driving aimlessly along a mile-long street before realizing I was probably going in the wrong direction. It was almost two in the morning. A few street lights here and there broke up the darkness, but it was hard to make out much of anything. Finally I pulled over at a twenty-four-hour gas station. It was empty except for a lone gas attendant, an older man with a graying beard. I locked my doors as he approached and then rolled down the window just an inch as I asked for directions. “Oh, you ain’t too far off.” The man scratched his head with diesel-stained fingers. “You gotta go back down this road…”
    “Can you hold on a second?” I dug around in my purse for a pen. “I want to write this down.” The man slowed his speech as I wrote and when I went over it, repeating his words back slowly to him, he grinned and nodded his head. “You’ll be fine,” he said, tapping the side of the car. “Just drive it like I said it.”
    He was right. Twenty minutes later, much to my relief, I was back on course.
    The sun was just starting to rise, dismissing the moon with a slow bleed of horizontal light, when I finally spotted the sign for Poultney. I pulled the car off to the side of the road, put my head down in the middle of the steering wheel, and took my first real breath since the trip had begun. It was 4:47 a.m.—eleven hours and forty-seven minutes after I had left Silver Springs.
    Sophie hadn’t told me where on Main Street her place was, but since the street itself was no longer than a football field, I drove up and down several times, looking for some kind of clue. It was a sweet, sleepy stretch of road, scattered with black lampposts and neat lawns. Green Mountain College sat at the north end of it, a tiny campus dotted with brick buildings, paved pathways, and a multitude of maple trees. I slowed the car down as I passed a Mobil station, Perry’s Family Eatery, the Poultney House of Pizza, something called the Red Brick Café, Tot’s Diner, a redbrick church, and finally, around a slight curve, Poultney High School.
    Interspersed between the business establishments were regular houses, all in various states of duress. Most of them were neatly maintained, with picture-perfect lawns and pristine front porches. One or two of them, however, looked as if they had been forgotten about entirely. I passed by them with my heart in my throat, hoping that I wouldn’t find some semblance of Sophie behind the peeling paint and rickety frames.
    My phone buzzed inside my pocket. Damn. I’d forgotten to call Mom again. She’d called as I’d been trying to find my way out of Albany and I’d lied, telling her that I had an hour or so more to go. I’d turned my phone off, but she’d probably been up the rest of night, pacing around the house. Dad too.
    “Mom,” I said. “I literally just got…”
    “You said you would call, Sophie. You promised!” Her voice was a combination of rage and tears.
    “I got lost, Mom. But I’m here now. I just this second drove into Poultney. I’m here, okay? And I’m fine. I’m totally fine.”
    She inhaled shakily. “Okay.”
    “I’m going to get Sophie now. I’ll call you in a little while.”
    I tossed the phone back into my bag and let my head fall back against the seat. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted