Free Off Course by Michelle Huneven

never actually left), noted whose car was parked down by the creek, in that spot hidden from the road. He’s so obvious and predictable , she wrote. She lurked among the aspens to see whom her home disgorged. I don’t care if he catches me. What could he say?
    The goal was not to catch him, but to convince herself. She got so she could tell. The way he joked with the checker at Younts. The change of voice in a weekender wife she’d waited on for years. How a strange woman sat at the bar alone, nursing a glass of wine, surreptitiously eyeing the cook’s window where Jakey manned the grill.
    Connie Yates unscrolled the register’s journal tape to see what he charged Sandi White for a dollar bag of spaghetti. Fifteen cents. Bottle of rosé, a dime.
    Connie pined for the day her youngest would graduate. She harangued herself not to sink back into self-deceit. My eyes have been opened and I have to keep them open … He’s not going to change … Only I can change. He’s mental and can’t stop himself, and he doesn’t even want to.
    â€œOh, here you go.” DeeDee pointed. “Look.”
    Cress looked. And saw her mother’s name, Sylvia Hartley .
    Cress’s heart rate shot up and her vision blurred. A long moment passed before the cursive words shivered through: Sylvia Hartley brought up a teacher friend last week—now she’s back, renting the Fuller cabin. J’s truck parked up on the spur behind.
    Cress trembled afterward from the scare.
    Some pages later: S. Hartley’s friend (Elsa?) rented Fullers’ again, moped around lodge all Saturday. J ignored—he’s moved on. Poor thing.
    Elsa! Cress knew Elsa, Elsa Calderon, solemn, moon-faced, forty-ish Elsa, plain as a nun, who taught Spanish and pinned gardenias on her blouse.
    Sitting thigh to thigh on the wicker love seat in the A-frame, the small book open on their knees, she and DeeDee read every entry.
    â€œWhat shall we do?” Cress said. “Xerox it and pass it out at the lodge?”
    â€œYeah!” DeeDee laughed. “We should charge for it. The bims’d pay.”
    â€œOh, they’d pay all right,” Cress said.
    Then they burned it in the fire. For Connie Yates’s sake.
    The cure, indeed.
    *   *   *
    â€œYou can come in.” He’d shown up late one afternoon. “But I’m done.” In the A-frame’s kitchen, he body-pressed her against the refrigerator, sent magnets skidding. “No, Jakey.” She slipped out from under him. “No more. It was fun for a while, but these unpredictable onslaughts make me crazy.”
    â€œOh, now, Hartley,” he said.
    â€œI can’t take it, Jakey. I want more of an everyday life with someone.”
    â€œAnd you expected that with me?” he said.
    â€œI don’t know what I expected.”
    â€œBut no hard feelings, right?”
    He deftly slid his arms around her and they both laughed, and she said, “No, Jakey,” and “No” again. She squirmed loose, and he took it in good humor and didn’t insist, and that was pretty much that.

 
    Six
    Her bones and muscles ached dully, sore from the whole wild ride. She was distressed, but at her own obtuseness. In the mornings, longing drew her awake, a claw of hope: only now, what did she long for? She lugged the card table and Selectric upstairs to her bedroom, away from the distractions of phone, refrigerator, and view. She drank a pot of coffee and quivering from caffeine pushed herself further into her second chapter, so she could finish that and move on to the next, and eventually into the rest of her life, post-diss.
    Franny appeared with the Hoover: the harbinger of parents.
    â€œSo soon?” Cress would’ve liked more time to herself.
    They showed up in time for her father to visit the carpenters on site. He came back grumbling. “That Crittenden kid just spent twenty minutes