Either the Beginning or the End of the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

leave,” Rosa says.
    â€˜â€˜Except how to get hired at the Press Room to play a few songs.”
    We decide we’ll work on that when we get to Chincoteague. How to break into music in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
    - - -
    We walk out, and our silly fantasy makes me homesick for being on Chincoteague with Rosa and Mr. Murray, where none of us has ever been. Rosa doesn’t mention this is the opposite of finding the soldier. If she had, I couldn’t explain. We walk along Islington Street through a tunnel of snow, holding tight to each other’s arms.

SECRETS
    Under streetlights, a snowplow shapes a narrow crescent around the curve of our street in Atlantic Heights. In the woods between our rows of houses and the bridge, pine boughs bend down, laden with snow. I see no path to the river. No trace of anyone ever walking through the deep snow and into the woods. Where would the soldier have gone? I wonder where he sleeps.
    I imagine the soldier with his yellow-green eyes weighted down with snow—like the trees—emerging from the woods. I want to keep talking with him, to tell him, “My mother is coming to live with me, after all my life of forgetting she has me.” I imagine his eyes and straight lips. He’s listening to me. I imagine if I touched him. Just my palm. To his arm. “My father says a girl needs to know her mother,” I would tell him. “But what does he know about girls? He just knows about everything else. He knows about fish.”
    Just then my father’s truck rattles around the curve. I stay busy, shoveling out the front doorway. His door squeals opens. Slams.
    â€œYou going to work?” he calls. “You need the truck?”
    â€œTomorrow and Friday,” I say. The reminder of the smell of pumpkin spice lattes at work makes me queasy.
    My father begins to shovel the snow that all but buries the towers of traps, the porch steps, and the driveway. Pilot races to the top and bottom of the crescent path. I help dig out the driveway to make room for the truck, then I dig out the path and stone steps to the porch. Layer by layer I take off clothes as I work till I’m down to my sweaty shirt. I heave shovelfull by shovelfull, getting clammy with sweat, my arms gone weak. But this is better than making lattes at Dunkin’ Donuts.
    I wish I could race into the woods and on to the little beach on the river. But the path is snowed in, and we are snowed in.
    My father fries up chicken and mashes potatoes, my favorite meal. While he cooks, I rekindle the fire in the woodstove. We don’t talk. His shoulders round over the stove as he turns the chicken in the skillet. They seem to sag like an old man’s shoulders. For a second I imagine him old in his plaid work shirt, bent over from the toll fishing takes on a body, like our friend Pete. He’s got fingers permanently bent back, a big scar above his eye, knees that don’t bend right so he shuffles. The image of my dad that way makes me wince.
    My father and I thaw out our achy hands and feet at the woodstove. He serves up the chicken and substantial gravy over our potatoes with the skin. I save most of mine for the next meal. If he notices, that’s not the fight he wants to fight. I don’t find a space in the quiet to describe to him what happened below the 95 bridge. I pull away in my own secret place. This is new, our having secret places. I shut my eyes in the firelight, and I don’t have to see his shoulders. My father says he’s going out fishing at four a.m. Needs some sleep. “I’ll drive all night,” he says. He is still tall, filling the frame of the door to his room.
    â€œMe, too,” I say, letting Springsteen talk for us. It’s a song about loving somebody so much you’d drive all night to bring them nothing but shoes, if shoes is what they want.
    Alone by the fire, I remember last night, knowing now that Luke had been my father’s