Free Echo Lake: A Novel by Letitia Trent Page A

shirt from the thrift store, explaining that she’d been wrong to leave, that it was an error, that she’d had nothing waiting for her where she’d gone and that she wanted nothing more than to slip back into the life that she’d abandoned.
    But it wasn’t possible. She had only a small amount of money saved to tide her over until she found a job. Having no rent helped, but she was still running out of money—food, gas, home repairs, and electric bills were slowly picking away at her savings. She had enough for four months, tops. She couldn’t make the two-day trip back to Columbus with no place to go, no job secured. Renting an apartment and paying the first month plus deposit would take out the equivalent of four months food budget here in Heartshorne. She was here for good, despite her fear after learning of how Frannie had died, despite the fact that (she had to face this, it was true) she didn’t feel much in common with the people she had met here so far, at least not the ones at the church meeting.
    She felt unkind to even think it, but there was a gap between her and the people she’d met so far. She’d been to college, she had lived in a city, she had lived with a man for almost ten years, yet had no children with him—these were all relatively rare things in Heartshorne. She had realized that at the church service, where questions about her job, her children, her family, had all fallen flat. So Emily was a rare and strange creature, somebody that they didn’t know how to categorize, exactly. And she, too, didn’t know where she fit.
    For now, being alone was a welcome change: she could walk around in her underwear and lie on the floor to read in the middle of the day, nowhere to go and no-one to please, but she could already feel that the freedom would soon weigh on her. Too much of nothing to do had never suited her well, and she knew she’d grow tired of it and look for something—a job, a friend, a lover—to create those limits and edges that would push her into some shape. She’d looked in the Heartshorne Gazette for jobs, hoping for something administrative. She could file and type and answer phones, at least until something better came along. But there was nothing administrative, which made sense—there were few offices in the area until you reached Keno, and the people who already had desk jobs probably held on tightly to them. She circled jobs that she never would have imagined herself taking: car hop at Sonic, waitress at the Keno Kitchen diner, stocker at Wal-Mart.
    Though objectively she understood that she’d have to take some kind of job—and soon—it didn’t feel urgent. She had lost the drive that she’d had her whole life, the feeling that she had to be doing something, anything, no matter how little she liked it or how little she understood its purpose. Now, she found herself satisfied to do nothing, and it frightened her. She woke up in the mornings and ate her breakfast at the kitchen table, the windows opened out into the damp backyard, trees and underbrush rustling with the movement of animals she couldn’t see. She’d waste hours just listening to how the house filled with sound as soon as she opened a door or window into the outdoors: the cricket-filled silence after dark and the daylight sounds of faraway car noises and the damp stickiness of her legs against the vinyl of her kitchen chairs or her feet slapping against the newly revealed living room floor. In Columbus, she’d been afraid of being still, of not moving forward, not moving forward was a kind of death. But how had she been moving forward while supporting Eric, moving up slowly in the ranks of a job she could hardly remember just a month after leaving it? She sometimes tried to think back to the steps she’d had to take every morning for four years at her previous job, which had involved typing new information about clients into computer accounts. She’d done this thousands of times, but she now she