He stared at the distant fields, wishing he were walking along the wide rows between the trees, smelling the sweet scent of rich earth and growing fruit.
There might be a breeze down there; even a breath of one would alleviate this stifling heat. Here, there was only the hot sun, beating down on the metal warehouse. Perspiration sheened his forehead and dampened the skin beneath his T-shirt.
The heat was getting to him and it was only the second week of June. There was no way he could handle summer in the Yakima Valley. It was time to move on again.
The realization exhausted him.
Not for the first time, he wondered how much longer he could do this, drift from town to town. Loneliness was wearing him down, whittling him away to a stringy shadow; unfortunately, the alternative was worse.
Once—it felt long ago now—he’d hoped that one of these places would feel right, that he’d come into some town, think, This is it, and dare to rent an apartment instead of a seedy motel room.
He no longer harbored such dreams. He knew better. After a week in the same room, he started to feel things, remember things. The nightmares would start. The only protection he had found was strangeness. If a mattress was never “his,” if a room remained unfamiliar territory, he could sometimes sleep for more than two hours at a time. If he settled in, got comfortable, and slept longer, he invariably dreamed about Diana.
That was okay. It hurt, of course, because seeing her face—even in his dreams—filled him with an ache that ran deep in his bones, but there was pleasure, too, a sweet remembrance of how life used to be, of the love he’d once been capable of feeling. If only the dreams stopped there, with memories of Diana sitting on the green grass of the Quad in her college days or of them cuddled up in their big bed in the house on Bainbridge Island.
He was never that lucky. The sweet dreams invariably soured and turned ugly. More often than not, he woke up whispering, “I’m sorry.”
The only way to survive was to keep moving and never make eye contact.
He’d learned in these vagrant years how to be invisible. If a man cut his hair and dressed well and held down a job, people saw him. They stood in line for the bus beside him, and in small towns they struck up conversations.
But if a man let himself go, if he forgot to cut his hair and wore a faded Harley-Davidson T-shirt and ragged, faded Levi’s, and carried a ratty backpack, no one noticed him. More important, no one recognized him.
Behind him, the bell rang. With a sigh, he stepped into the warehouse. The icy cold hit him instantly. Cold storage for the fruit. The sweat on his face turned clammy. He tossed his empty Coke can in the trash, then went back outside.
For a split second, maybe less, the heat felt good; by the time he reached the loading dock, he was sweating again.
“Wyatt,” the foreman yelled, “what do you think this is, a damn picnic?”
Joe looked at the endless row of slat-sided trucks, filled to heaping with newly picked cherries. Then he studied the other men unloading the crates—Mexicans mostly, who lived in broken-down trailers on patches of dry, dusty land without flushing toilets or running water.
“No, sir,” he said to the florid-faced foreman who clearly got his kicks from yelling at his workers. “I don’t think this is a picnic.”
“Good. Then get to work. I’m docking you a half an hour’s pay.”
In his former life, Joe would have grabbed the foreman by his sweaty, dirty collar and shown him how men treated one another.
Those days were gone.
Slowly, he walked toward the nearest truck, pulling a pair of canvas gloves out of his back pocket as he moved.
It was time to move on.
Claire stood at the kitchen sink, thinking about the phone conversation with Meg yesterday.
“Mommy, can I have another Eggo?”
“How do we ask for that?” Claire said absently.
“Mommy, may I please have another Eggo?”
Claire turned away from the window and dried her hands on the dish towel hanging from the oven door. “Sure.” She popped a frozen waffle into the toaster. While it was warming, she looked around the kitchen for more dirty dishes—
And saw the place through her sister’s eyes.