Free Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech Page B

plain and simple things. His favorite clothes are the flannel shirts and blue jeans that he has had for twenty years. It nearly killed him to buy white shirts and a suit for his new job in Euclid.
    He loved the farm because he could be out in the real air, and he wouldn’t wear work gloves because he liked to touch the earth and the wood and the animals. It was painful for him to go to work in an office when we moved. He did not like being sealed up inside with nothing real to touch.
    We’d had the same car, a blue Chevy, for fifteen years. He couldn’t bear to part with it because he had touched—and repaired—every inch of it. I also think he couldn’t bear the thought that if he sold it, someone might take it to the junkyard. My father hated the whole idea of putting cars out to pasture. He often prowled through junkyards touching old cars and buying old alternators and carburetors just for the joy of cleaning them up and making them work again. My grandfather had never quite gotten the hang of car mechanics, and so he thought my father was a genius.
    My mother was right when she said my father was good. He was always thinking of little things to cheer up someone else. This nearly drove my mother crazy because I think she wanted to keep up with him, but it was not her natural gift like it was with my father. He would be out in the field and see a flowering bush that my grandmother might like, and he would dig the whole thing up and take it straight over to Gram’s garden and replant it. If it snowed, he would be up at dawn to trek over to his parents’ house and shovel out their driveway.
    If he went into town to buy supplies for the farm, he would come back with something for my mother and something for me. They were small things—a cotton scarf, a book, a glass paperweight—but whatever he brought, it was exactly what you would have picked out for yourself.
    I had never seen him angry. “Sometimes I don’t think you’re human,” my mother told him. It was the sort of thing she said just before she left, and it bothered me, because it seemed as if she wanted him to be meaner, less good.
    Two days before she left, when I first heard her raise the subject of leaving, she said, “I feel so rotten in comparison.”
    “Sugar, you’re not rotten,” he said.
    “See?” she said. “See? Why couldn’t you at least believe I am rotten?”
    “Because you’re not,” he said.
    She said she had to leave in order to clear her head, and to clear her heart of all the bad things. She needed to learn about what she was.
    “You can do that here, Sugar,” he said.
    “I need to do it on my own,” she said. “I can’t think. All I see here is what I am not. I am not brave. I am not good. And I wish someone would call me by my real name. My name isn’t Sugar. It’s Chanhassen.”
    She had not been well. She had had some terrible shocks, it is true, but I did not understand why she could not get better with us. I begged her to take me with her, but she said I could not miss school and my father needed me and besides, she had to go alone. She had to.
    I thought she might change her mind, or at least tell me when she was leaving. But she did neither of those things. She left me a letter which explained that if she said good-bye, it would be too terribly painful and it would sound too permanent. She wanted me to know that she would think of me every minute and that she would be back before the tulips bloomed.
    But, of course, she was not back before the tulips bloomed.
    It nearly killed my father after she left, I know it, but he continued on doing everything just as before, whistling and humming and finding little gifts for people. He kept bringing home gifts for my mother and stacking them in a pile in their bedroom.
    On the day after he found out she wasn’t returning, he flew to Lewiston, Idaho, and when he came back, he spent three days chipping away at the fireplace hidden behind the plaster wall. Some of the