Free Off Course by Michelle Huneven Page A

trying to change a router bit—it was like he’d never handled one before. Of course, Rick’s paying him a full carpenter’s wage! And charging me 10 percent on top of that!”
    Later, while Cress helped her mother with the dinner dishes, her father slipped upstairs, read her new pages, then thumped down again. “Seeing as I invested in your education, I took a look at your progress. I have to admit, your writing does improve as you revise.”
    She and her mother exchanged bright, surprised looks. Sam Hartley praised so rarely, Cress decided on the spot to overlook his snooping.
    â€œI, however, find that I never need to revise.” Sam squatted to poke the fire. “Whatever I write comes out best in the first pass. But then I know what I’m going to say before I start.” He spoke over his shoulder. “That way I don’t waste paper. Think things through first and you’ll save time and supplies.” He stood and went outside to the porch.
    â€œHe begrudges me paper ?”
    â€œOh dear,” Sylvia whispered. “I don’t know why he’s like that.”
    Sam came back inside with an armload of wood. “And you haven’t kept the temperature log.”
    â€œI know, Dad.”
    â€œI ask you to do one thing, and you can’t be bothered?”
    â€œIt’s your thing, Dad. Not mine.”
    â€œYou live here rent-free, eat our food, burn the wood I chop—?”
    â€œNow, Sam,” said Sylvia.
    â€œShe’s almost thirty! When will she be weaned?”
    In a single swoop, Cress crossed the room, pulled her jacket from its peg. “I’ll leave. I’m happy to leave. I’ll leave tomorrow, first thing.”
    She loped down the porch steps and the driveway, then turned right, past the Orlisses’, into the farthest, uninhabited loop of the subdivision. The moon was an ungainly oblong. How dare her father claim reading rights to her work when, in fact, she’d worked and gone into debt for graduate school, and had paid her own way since college, except for a few emergencies, like when her CETA job hadn’t paid her on time. And she’d quit that job, which would have been so good to put on her résumé, to take a waitressing job in order to make her student-loan payments. Working at the Dinner Plate had been hateful, eight hours on that concrete floor, hounded by a boss who criticized her appearance and her job performance nonstop by day, then called her at home at night, drunk, to beg for sex. After her last shift at the Dinner Plate, Cress had unlaced her white orthopedics, stepped out of them by the front door, and walked to her car in her stocking feet.
    She would leave the A-frame, too, as happily: good riddance to the Meadows and its denizens. But where would she go? To return to Pasadena felt like going backward. As for joining John Bird in Minneapolis—unthinkable!
    So maybe she’d light out to parts unknown, like Bishop, Mammoth, or Tahoe; she could rent a room, work the breakfast shift in a coffee shop, type in secret all night. Or fly to London and Sharon’s lumpy couch.
    Leaking into her thoughts came a sound so mournful, so minimally tuneful, Cress mistook it for an animal’s cry or the creaking of trees. Then came the first recognizable bit, a scrap of “House of the Rising Sun.” Another scrap was possibly the yodeling riff in “Lovesick Blues.” An accordion? No, wheezier. Bagpipe? The shreds of melody stayed so low and private, a step could take her out of range and she couldn’t get a fix on it.
    Back in the A-frame her mother was reading Simenon and nursing a plastic cup of bourbon. Her father had a flashlight in pieces on the table. Cress went upstairs without a word. Her mother came in and sat at the foot of her bed. “Don’t let him get to you. Rick has him all upset. Nobody wants you to leave.”
    â€œThanks, Mom.”
    â€œIf you