Free The Best People in the World by Justin Tussing Page A

“You’re going to thank me for this, Thomas. You get into a car expecting it to take you somewhere physical, but when you travel, you bring more than just your body.”
    He watched me stow my luggage, such as it was, in the two-wheeled fiberglass trailer he’d bolted to the rear of Alice’s car—the trailer looked like one of those Styrofoam boxes fast-food places used for hamburgers. I had two hundred dollars in my wallet, another four wadded in my shoe. I’d never carried so much money in all my life. I felt both rich and stingy.
    Shiloh pulled a pair of cheap-looking sunglasses from a paper bag; the lenses were heavily mirrored at the tops and bottoms but had a stripe across the middle where the mirroring had been worn away. He put these on. “Say hello to the rest of your life. Here’s Alice.”
    She was pulling half a dozen grocery bags out of her building. I went to help her. The bags contained kitchen stuff: pots, pans, a cookie sheet, plastic bowls, a set of measuring cups, a stack of dishes.
    She must have just stepped out of the shower; her eyelashes held the tiniest globules of water. Alice’s eyes were a compromise between gold and green. The faintest crow’s feet made her appear a little dour. The only explanation I can give for those wrinkles is that she smiled with all her face. She was twenty-five. She wrapped her arms around my waist and kissed my neck. I saw where the bandanna she wore was soaked through. The blunt ends of her hair, dripping onto the collar of her blouse, rendered the fabric translucent. Her hair looked almost black while it held water, but it dried yellow blond, like pine wood. She used to keep it shoulder length, but in the spirit of change, she had allowed Shiloh to cut it above her nape. Her complexion was particularly fair, but the skin those shears exposed was buttermilk. I hooked my thumbs beneath her earlobes and bent her head back. I kissed her on the lips and on the point of her chin.
    â€œLet’s go,” she said.
    And while Shiloh found room for these last, last things (he packed them on either side of himself for the sake of symmetry and because he didn’t expect he’d have a need to get out of the car in a hurry), Alice got the car started, selected a gear, eased out the clutch.
    The dappled light scrolled across the windshield.
    Shiloh slapped his hands on the back of my seat. “Wait and see. You get into a car expecting the scenery is going to be the only thing to change. Watch out. Watch out!” A rabbit darted across the road. “We’ll become better people with every mile.”
    I hadn’t worked out anything to say, and the moment felt so full I just wanted to keep it inside me. At the first stoplight I was almost overcome with emotions. I needed to shout or for someone to hit me. I faked a yawn in order to relieve some of the pressure inside my chest. The light went to green. Alice got us on the elevated highway and then we were on that vertiginous bridge and the town was behind us. There was a hiccup at the top when the car crested and got light on its suspension. The Ohio beneath us, as still as a line on a map. One thing we couldn’t see was Shiloh’s crooked shed. Had it washed away or was that single room intact but inundated, like the chamber of a heart?
    â€œI predict,” said Shiloh, “we will never need return to that damptown.” He reached his arm past my head and stuck his hand out the window.
    â€œDon’t do that,” said Alice.
    â€œWhat did you do?” Every breath was holding on and letting go.
    â€œA gesture.”
    â€œI can’t believe it,” said Alice.
    She was correct. Each moment was unprecedented. At some point Mary, Fran, and Pawpaw would come to a similar conclusion. And years later, when I had even less of an idea of what I’d done, Fran would ask me if it hadn’t been that stupid job that I was running from.
    We