Free When Autumn Leaves: A Novel by Amy S. Foster Page A

unappreciated. She was tired of feeling like an outsider. The world was so very big, somewhere there was room enough for a different kind of girl like Stella to be happy. So she packed her bags, grabbed the $183 she had saved over the course of her lifetime, took Pearl’s book, wrote a note to her family, and walked down the mountain-side without looking back even once. Pearl was gone, and Stella was too.
    She worked at a diner, renting a single room from an old widow who needed the extra cash. She scrimped and saved until she had enough money to buy a car. It was really a piece of crap, rusted inside and out, no windshield wipers. Its old radio only ever got two static stations. When she bought it, she quit her job and started driving west, making her way from town to town, eating peanut butter and white bread for breakfast and dinner. She would often sleep in her car, working odd jobs when she saw ads, picking crops when farmers needed seasonal labor, or selling remedies she would concoct from roadside plants to strangers she could just tell would need them.
    One day, having crossed the entire country, she stumbled onto the car ferry to Avening. When her old car died half a mile from the dock, she took it as a sign. She’d been in Avening ever since.
    Stella felt more at home in Avening than she ever had in Kentucky, which was amazing, since when she’d lived in Kentucky she’d had no way of knowing she didn’t feel at home. She knew that this was a place that was right for a person like her. Stella was one of those people with odd talents and special gifts. That energy that she felt when she laid her hands on someone floated through the air in Avening. The town buzzed and hummed and purred. It felt alive.
    She enjoyed her job at the Circle , the local paper. She felt she helped people, even if it wasn’t on the personal level that she was trained for. The thought occasionally crossed her mind that she should get back into the business of mending. But it reminded her too much of home. It made her feel guilty. It just didn’t seem right that she would abandon her own kinfolk to tend to a bunch of strangers. So she helped out here and there where she could. She used her gifts, but she turned away from what she really was.
    Eventually, though, that decision took its toll. Lately she had begun to feel that something was off. It was hard for Stella to be objective about much of anything, let alone herself. How could Stella have known, when she left home, how much of herself the mountain would take as a sacrifice? The years and time had revealed the gaps in Stella’s character. The mountain took that part of Stella that used to make others gravitate towards her. Out of fascination or fear or awe, she had drawn people to her. But now she forgot the rules of being social, so she blundered along, trying to be bigger than life in hopes that no one would miss her.
    Stella knew she could never go home, for many reasons, but most important because home had irrevocably become Avening. Now she was caught in a place where she knew she belonged and yet which didn’t belong to her at all. Even if she did go back to haunt the former places of her childhood, she knew that in truth all she would find would be the ghosts of her former self. The mountain had let her go, and now she needed something solid, something she could hold onto.
    There wasn’t really any particular aspect of her life that was totally wrong. And sometimes she wondered if maybe everything was in place, if maybe this is what it was like to be an adult, to constantly feel like she was waiting for something, or searching for something. Perhaps nothing was missing at all. Was happiness a thing? Something to be measured and defined? There were moments when Stella found herself thinking, yes, I am happy now. But in just thinking those thoughts, she drove them away, as if happiness itself was not a thing to be acknowledged. So she ignored it, hoping that somehow happiness