Free What Comes After by Steve Watkins Page B

awake.
Beatrice’s parents weren’t talking anymore.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that and what it meant. The chances of me going back to Maine were more remote than ever, and I felt myself sinking so low that I was in danger of being swallowed by my bed. I finally turned on the light and picked up
Huckleberry Finn.
I flipped through to a favorite passage I’d marked. Huck and Jim are drifting down the Mississippi River, just the two of them, hiding from the civilized world, which seems less and less civilized every time they go on shore. Off the river there’s only sadness and trouble: bloody feuds and dead children, grieving parents and lynch mobs, slave traders and murderers, the bloody corpse of Huck’s dad, Pap.
    But when they’re on the river, it’s different.
    Soon as it was night out we shoved; when we got her out to about the middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and talked about all kinds of things. . . . Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark — which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two — on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.
    It reminded me of Dad, and Maine, and the life we had when I was little — going on vet rounds, visiting farms, playing with animals, hiking through the Maine woods, climbing Mount Katahdin, watching movies about heroic dogs and horses with great heart. It reminded me of Beatrice, too — the Beatrice from when I was younger: playing softball, riding her horse, laughing about boys, casting off in our sea kayaks to explore hidden coves along the coast.
    I finally fell asleep remembering all of that. None of it existed anymore, but I hoped I could dream about it and have it be mine again at least for a little while, for whatever was left of the night.

Aunt Sue bought a new truck that weekend. It was fire-engine red. She hadn’t told us she was getting it, just drove it into the yard when she came back later than usual from the farmers’ market. She parked next to the back steps and practically needed a ladder to get down.
    Book scratched his big head. “How’d you get this, Mama?” Aunt Sue didn’t answer at first, but Book kept asking until she said, “It’s from the estate.”
    “What estate?” I said, but I already knew the answer.
    “Your dad’s,” she said. “They appointed me the executor, or I guess they said it was the execu
trix,
and I figured we needed a new truck. See? It’s got a king cab.”
    I thought again about all the things Aunt Sue had bought lately, supposedly from her big raise: the high-definition TV, the new CD player, the satellite dish. And now this hulking pickup. How much of Dad’s money had she spent?
    The truck especially was a slap in the face. I hated big polluter trucks and SUVs, and Dad did, too. When I was little, he called them “P of the P,” which stood for “Part of the Problem,” and I grew up yelling that out to him every time I saw one. “Dad! Dad! It’s a P of the P!” If it was a van with a really big family — four kids, two parents — he said that was an exception. Same thing if it was a working truck, like the one we had. But he hated them otherwise.
    Aunt Sue could have fit all her stuff for the farmers’ market in a hatchback. There was no need for her to have a truck the size of the Tundra.
    If she’d wanted to get to me, she’d finally succeeded. My dreams about Maine ended as soon as I woke up the next morning. I was never going back there to live. I knew that now.