“I just want to be careful.” Hawley spooned fried rice and moo shu chicken into pans. He lit the burners, and then he rolled a cigarette and lit that, too. “We won’t make it to the fair tomorrow. But we’ll find another one somewhere else. Ride the Ferris wheel.”
Loo tore open one of the fortune cookie bags. She cracked the shell, pulled out the tiny paper fortune.
“What’s it say?” Hawley asked.
“Land is always on the mind of the flying bird.”
“Open another one.”
Loo smashed a cookie against the table. “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”
“That’s more like it.”
She watched her father cook. His hair was threaded through with lines of silver. The skin on his fingers rough and cracked. Someday, he was going to be an old man, and she would have to take care of him. But not now. Not yet. The smell of hoisin sauce and cabbage filled the room. She wondered how long it would be before they had a kitchen again.
“The things I did before,” her father said. “They weren’t right. I was young. And I didn’t understand what a life can mean in this world.” Hawley stirred the pots. He let out a cloud of smoke. “Now I have you and I know better. But the past is like a shadow, always trying to catch up.”
“So what do we do?” Loo asked.
“We eat,” said Hawley, setting down their plates. “And then we run before it gets us.”
—
A HOUSE IS harder to leave than a motel room. Still, Hawley seemed like he’d been planning this escape for years. He had an envelope ready with Loo’s birth certificate and their passports. He talked with Joe Strand and Pauly Fisk about finding a renter. Then he called Mabel Ridge and asked if Loo could spend the night with her. His daughter had never seen him be so polite.
“I’m not going over there,” Loo said after he hung up the phone.
“There’s things I need to do,” said Hawley. “And I won’t be able to do them if I’m worried about you.”
“What things?”
Hawley lifted the edges of the tablecloth and picked up everything inside, the plates and glasses and silverware, and dumped it all into the garbage can. “I don’t want to lie to you. So please don’t ask.”
“I’m not a little girl anymore.”
“I know,” said Hawley. “But I need you to be a kid for one more night. I’ll come and get you first thing in the morning. We’ll go away for a few months. It’ll be like a vacation. Then if everything checks out, we’ll come back.”
“But I yelled at Mabel. I smashed her dishes.”
“She’s your grandmother,” said Hawley. “She’ll forgive you.”
He went upstairs and packed. It took him only ten minutes. He dropped his bag and his orange toolbox by the door, and then he started to gather his guns. The Colt, the Smith & Wesson, the Luger, the Saturday night specials, the shotguns, Loo’s rifle and the set of derringers. Hawley piled them all on the kitchen table, along with his case of suppressors and bags of ammunition, hemming and hawing the same way that Loo had struggled to decide which pair of jeans to put in her suitcase. In the end he left none of them behind.
While he finished, Loo went upstairs. Out on the roof the shingles were cold. There was a breeze coming directly off the shoreline, and it smelled of seaweed and sand. It smelled like home. Loo pulled her arms into her sweater and hugged them close. She wanted to know where this exact spot was on the map, so she could put her finger on it when they were gone and remember.
She had already packed her telescope, but in Carl Sagan’s book, she’d read instructions on how to find longitude and latitude, using a clock set to Greenwich Mean Time and the North Star. Holding her arm out, and starting at the horizon, she counted how many fists fit in the sky until she reached the bright spot of Polaris. Each fist equaled approximately ten degrees, which meant they were somewhere between forty-two and forty-three degrees north.
The front door opened, and she watched as Hawley carried a box out to the edge of the sidewalk, where she’d dragged the garbage earlier that night for pickup. He set the box right by the cans. He looked up at the sliver of moon. The light from the window cut across his face, dividing his body into sections of shadow and radiant strips of white, like something that had been taken apart and reassembled without all the original pieces.
Loo crawled back inside. She went down the staircase and peered inside the bathroom. The door to the medicine cabinet was open and reflected her own face back at her. Hawley had cleared the shelves. The lipstick, the compact powder, her mother’s toothbrush and all of the old prescriptions with Lily’s faded name on them were missing. The perfume bottle was gone. The cans of pineapple and peaches. The shampoo and conditioner from their places on the side of the tub.
Hawley came back inside with a garbage bag in his hand. He started taking down the pictures from the walls. The receipts and scraps of paper, the scribbles on parking tickets, the grocery lists. The picture from Niagara Falls.
“You’re throwing everything away?”
“Not everything.” Hawley turned to her. “Is there anything you want?”
Loo scanned the counter, the tub, the empty towel racks. The walls looked so naked without her mother’s belongings. The room suddenly larger and full of possibility.
“The bathrobe.”
Hawley unhooked the kimono with the dragons from the back of the door. He opened it like a coat, and Loo slipped her arms inside. She’d done this dozens of times over the years growing up, but this was the first time the robe fit her. The sleeves fell from her arms, the green silk still bright.
She reached for the photo strip next. It was the only picture she’d ever seen that had both Hawley and Lily together. Her mother making faces, her father moving out of the frame. She pulled, and the tape ripped the bottom corner, so that a part of the picture remained in place. She held the photo out to Hawley. Her father eyed the tiny triangle of black-and-white left behind.
“You keep it.”
Loo took out her envelope from the Sawtooth. She put the picture in between the bills. She counted the money. Principal Gunderson had slipped an extra hundred dollars into the stack. When she looked up, her father was still staring at the torn piece of photo left on the wall.
“Dad?”
“Get the jars,” Hawley said. He turned away and finished taking down the rest. He stuffed everything inside the garbage bag, and then brought it outside.
Loo opened the back of the toilet, placed the heavy ceramic lid on the seat, then slid her hands inside the water and pulled out the licorice jars. She set them side by side on the counter. She looked for something to dry them off with, but Hawley had thrown away all the towels. She wiped the glass with some toilet paper, then brought the jars into the living room.
Hawley was on his knees in front of the bearskin rug. “Give them here,” he said.
She thought he would open the jars and count the money, but instead he laid them end to end across the rug then started rolling them up inside, tucking the tail and moving toward the head, so that when he was finished, the bear’s chin rested on top of the bundle.