Free A Thousand Miles from Nowhere by John Gregory Brown Page A

a garden of hostas and peonies and phlox and a dozen other flowers and plants whose names he knew from Amy but couldn’t identify, not even if a gun were put to his head. Maybe he could roll the car windows down and drive until he detected the scent of her cooking, of whatever recipe she was trying out.
    Was it possible that Amy already knew he was here, had felt some change in the atmospheric pressure, some subtle signal in her dreams that announced his arrival, the same way she’d known, three years ago, that she was pregnant but that something was somehow wrong, that her body and the baby weren’t right?
    She’d had a dream, she told Henry, that she was growing taller, a little more every day until she no longer fit into her clothes, her sleeves inching their way up her arms, her toes punching through her shoes. She had to bend down to step through doorways, had to sleep curled up on the bed. This time she hadn’t asked Henry what the dream meant, hadn’t wanted him to explain. Six weeks later she’d had a miscarriage, and for the next few months she’d cried every night when she got into bed, curled on her side exactly the way she had imagined herself curled up in her dream, her hands tucked between her knees. Henry, who had been both terrified and thrilled at the prospect of being a father, had not known how to comfort her except to say that they could try again, that he was sure the next time everything would be fine.
    But there had not been a next time, and Amy had gradually set aside her sadness in the manner she always did, with a kind of ferocious energy that Henry admired but could never muster for himself. He was always amazed by Amy’s capacity for joy. She’d had plenty of tragedy in her life—her parents had died a few years before she and Henry met, in a plane crash on their way to visit her brother in Sierra Leone, where he worked for a relief agency. But sadness never managed to take hold of her the way it did Henry; she seemed to emerge from it with a kind of burnished regard for all that was remarkable and fortunate in her life.
    “It’s all a wonder,” she’d said one Saturday morning to Henry as he lay next to her in bed. His eyes were still closed; he hadn’t moved but she knew he was awake. It was spring, and when he opened his eyes he saw that she was sitting up and looking out the window, running her hands through the tangle of her hair. He told her he’d misunderstood her for a moment, thought she’d said wander.
    “That too,” she said. “It is all a wander.” And she lay back down and started in on one of her favorite games, reciting whichever list she’d been forming in her head: ideas for future volumes of A Pilgrim’s Provisions, or the places in the world she’d like to go that she had not yet been, or the foods she most longed to eat again—tropical Filipino fruit salad and Indonesian fish eggs and Australian wild boar and roasted Basque peppers with cider.
    “I don’t want to go anywhere, ” he’d once said to her as she spoke, her eyes closed as she imagined a trip down the Amazon, stopping at each village along the way to find out which foods they considered their greatest delicacy. Everywhere in the world, she’d once told Henry, it was the foods that were considered aphrodisiacs that were deemed to be the most delicious, no matter how disgusting they actually tasted.
    “Except here,” Henry had added, sneaking his hand beneath the sheet, beneath her nightgown. “I don’t want to go anywhere except here.”
    “You’re an idiot,” she’d said, but she kept her eyes closed, let his hand work its way up her leg.
    “Yes, but I’m your idiot,” Henry had said.
    “My idiot, yes,” she’d said. “All mine.”
      
    He returned to Route 29 and headed back to the motel. He figured he would get his bag and say good-bye to Latangi. He would thank her for her kindness, ask what it was she wanted to speak with him about, and then be on his way. Only then