Free The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel

wasting both time and food.)
    In the two years he’d lived there, Amos had added a screened porch onto the back of the house, facing the narrow backyard and the gardens he planted, and the white, tumble-down garage he used as a storage shed. Living there in Haddington, in this beautiful house, Amos was happier than he felt he had any right to be, or he had been happy, anyway, and for quite a long time. In the late afternoon and early evening, when he didn’t have obligations at the church, he loved sitting on the screened porch with a glass of wine and a book, although he had to be discreet about drinking wine. He was a Pietist by profession, and the peace churches felt strongly about sobriety. (The authors of the Bible seemed not to have felt so: wine is mentioned 520 times in the First and Second Testaments.) And there was virtually no social or casual drinking in the small towns of eastern and central Indiana; either one was a drinker, and belonged to a drinking class, or one was a teetotaler.
    An alley ran next to Amos’s house, and there was another at the south end of his property, where the gardens ended. On the opposite side of that alley was an abandoned warehouse, large and constructed of wood so dark it appeared to have been dipped in creosote. Amos faced this building when he sat on his screened porch, and he spent a long time studying it. In certain lights he could see the faint traces of an old Pepsi advertisement shining up like chiaroscuro: the bottle (at an odd angle, as if it might be flying through space) surrounded by bubbles that were probably dazzling when first painted, and the logo, unchanged for decades and instantly recognizable. The logos of soda. It was a funny idea to a man like Amos, the changing location and extension of the sacred. The Pepsi sign suddenly revealing itself in the dying light, intruding on his evening, had the potential to haul up a freight car of cynical resignation in him, but for some reason it never had.
    Indiana was a world-class firefly state, and time and again Amos watched them come out in the evening. There were always a few moments, warm from the first drink of wine, when he felt he was living in the fantastic air between seasons: there were the morning glory vines in the collapsing fence; the beans climbing the poles; the slate flagstones that led to the porch, silvered; the white shed; the lightning bugs’ green bellies; and suddenly, out of nowhere, the airborne Pepsi bottle, a knock from the past. For Amos the painting was both more and less than the merely commercial: it was nostalgic, and thus served to remind him that he was lost and far from home. More importantly, it was a message.
The signs are fading, just like you always knew they would.
    *
    Just before the streetlights blinked on, Amos saw AnnaLee Braverman walking down the alley toward his porch. She was carrying a basket over her right forearm, as if she’d brought Toto with her. AnnaLee was one of the few people from whom Amos didn’t need to hide his wine glass, which made him especially fond of her. There were, in fact, countless things he appreciated about AnnaLee. He liked her wildness, the way she carried herself like a great ship through the world; her grief, and her great mind; the way she listened in church, her strange vulnerability to her mother. She had a resilient, perfectly normal marriage, she was afraid to drive, and she dreamed primarily in smells. She interested him.
    Rising, Amos opened the screen door. “Don’t think I can’t see you haunting my alley, AnnaLee Braverman.”
    She raised a hand in surrender. “You caught me.”
    “Come on in,” Amos said, gesturing to the wicker furniture on the porch. “Is that a present for me in that basket?”
    “As a matter of fact.” AnnaLee sat down in the rocker and opened the basket. “Dill bread. Fresh butter from the dairy. You’re too thin.”
    “Hmmmm. I only
look
too thin so people like you will bake for me.” He went into