Northwest Corner Read Online Free PDF

so cheap sometimes.”
    “I’m going to get some air for a minute.”
    “You already got some.”
    I look at her.
    She puts her hands on her hips—her lippy pose. “What, like youthink you’re invisible on the security camera back there? You got a nicotine problem, Dwight. That’s bad .”
    I grin. “I know.”
    I head out the front doors. Weekdays can’t touch weekends in the sporting-goods trade, and the parking lot is only a quarter full.
    For Chang’s ice-skate customer, I pick the Mercedes SUV, and a Subaru Outback wagon for the schoolteacher type I saw poking around the Patagonia fleece vests in aisle three. Just a little game of mine to pass the time. A palm tree is growing out of a clump of green between the lot and the four-lane Calle Real, and high up its leaves are shimmying in a breeze that, down where I’m standing, I can’t even feel. A hallucinatory taste of the evening’s first cold beer starts climbing the back of my throat, and this is not an unhappy thing.
    Then a yawn convulses me, and the moment it’s over I feel doomed by fatigue.

SAM
    H E COLLECTS HIS DUFFEL from the luggage well. The driver points him in the direction of the municipal bus stop half a mile away, and he starts to walk. Late afternoon, a fog of exhaustion in his head. Moving, after three days of sitting, still bruised from the fight, like an old man with rickets.
    He observes that Santa Barbara is a clean and prosperous town, not entirely real. Half the street names are in Spanish. The few people he sees are sun-browned and mostly blond, dressed in shorts, T-shirts, slip-on sneakers, or flip-flops. They appear to regard him, if they regard him at all, with curious suspicion, as a ragged and somewhat embarrassing spectacle from the Far North. An assessment with which he cannot disagree. He thinks how the nights back East will still be cold. The fog in his head slowly beginning to lift, he remembers Emma holding him that night two years ago, her hand burning down the front of his jeans as she presses him against the rusted feed trough of the abandoned farm in Falls Village. The feeling of being, just this once, a single body, two broken pieces forged together in the secret, dew-ridden dark.
    His arm has begun to ache, and he stops to switch the duffel to his other hand. A light breeze blowing in from the west. In it the fermented whiff of his own body and what he hopes might be the briny breath of the Pacific. Though right now he can’t see his way to the ocean; just the sourceless egg-blue light everywhere and the vertiginous, faintly swaying palms along the broad sunbaked streets whose brightness has begun to infect him like the onset of motion sickness.
    He remembers sitting on a sofa next to his dad and watching aballgame, the smells of furniture leather and cooked popcorn, his dad’s heavy arm resting on his shoulders, pulling him in; but which year and which game he doesn’t know and will never trust.
    And so it goes: the duffel switching hand to hand, the mind clear but seeing backward, the angled sun anointing him like a troubled pilgrim who’s journeyed to the far edge of the continent in search of a blessing that he doesn’t believe in but can’t stop looking for.

PENNY
    T HURSDAY OFFICE HOURS RUN FORTY MINUTES LATE because her toughest, most confident student (the brassy, probably gay, raven-haired junior who starts at point guard for the women’s varsity basketball team and who for some reason seemed to believe, until today, that a poem, no matter how well made, is just a simple equation with a plug-in answer), Angela, while reading aloud some Louise Glück lines on the death of the poet’s father, bursts into tears, right in her office. Not so discrete or containable after all, this big, intelligent, well-defended girl, whose own father turns out to be on his deathbed. There she sits, gasping with sobs, stripped right down to the interior—the soft tissue, where the pain resides and the words, if