She went straight out, though it was only twenty-five to eight. He heard the engine start, saw the blue Japanese car go past the picture window, going fast.
When he came to wash up at the sink he found her saucer chipped and the handle broken off the coffee cup. The small violence made his stomach turn over. He stood with his hands on the rim of the sink, his mouth open, swaying a little from foot to foot, a habit he had when distressed. He reached slowly forward, turned the cold water tap on, and let the water run. He watched it, the rush and stream and clarity of it, filling and overflowing the broken cup.
He washed the dishes, locked up, and set off. Right on Oak Valley, left on Pine View, and on. It was pleasant walking, the air sweet, the lid of the hot day not closed down yet. He got into a good swinging pace and after ten or twelve blocks had walked free of the grip of his mother’s mood. But as he went on, checking his watch, he began to doubt that he could get to the creek place before he had to turn around and start back towards Sam’s in order to get to work at ten. How had he got to the creek, stayed there, and come back, night before last, all in two hours? Maybe he was off course now, not going there by the shortest way, or headed wrong altogether. The part of his mind that did not use words to think with ignored these doubts and worries, guiding him from street to street through about five miles of Kensington Heights and Sylvan Dell and Chelsea Gardens to the gravel road above the fields.
The big building near the freeway was the paint factory; from here you saw the back of its big many-colored sign. He went as far as the chainlink fence around its parking lot and looked down from the higher land there, trying to see the golden sunset fields he had seen from the car. In the morning light they had no glamour. Weedy, farmed once but no longer plowed or grazed, derelict. Waiting for the developers. A NO DUMPING sign stuck up out of a ditch full of thistles near the rusted chassis of a car. Far off across the fields clumps of trees cast their shadows westward; beyond them were the woods, rising blue in the smoggy, sunlit air. It was past eight-thirty, and getting hot.
Hugh took off his jeans jacket and wiped the sweat off his forehead and cheeks. He stood a minute looking towards the woodlands. If he went, even if he did no more than drink from the creek and leave at once, he would probably be late to work. He swore out loud, bitterly, and turned, and went back down the gravel road by the down-at-heel farmhouses and the tree nursery or Christmas tree lot or whatever it was, cut through to Chelsea Gardens Place, and walking steadily along the curved treeless streets between lawns, carports, houses, lawns, carports, houses, reached Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart at ten minutes to ten. He was red-faced and sweaty, and Donna, in the stockroom, said, “You overslept, Buck.”
Donna was about forty-five. She had a lot of dark red hair, which she had recently got made into a fashionable mane of curls and tendrils that made her look twenty from behind and sixty face on. She had a good figure, bad teeth, one bad son who drank, and one good son who drove in stock-car races. She liked Hugh and talked to him whenever she got a chance, telling him—sometimes from checkstand to checkstand across the carts and customers—about the teeth, the sons, her husband’s mother’s cancer, her dog’s pregnancy and its complications; she offered him puppies; they told each other the plots of movies and television shows. She had named him Buck his first day at work. “Buck Rogers in the twenty-first century, I bet you’re too young to remember the real one,” and she laughed at the paradox. This morning she said, “You overslept, Buck. Shame on you.”
“I got up at seven,” he countered.
“Then what you been running for? There’s steam coming off you!”
He stood not knowing what to say, then gasped at the word. “Running,” he said. “You know. Supposed to be good for you.”
“Yeah, there was some besseller about that, wasn’t there? Like jogging only a lot harder. What do you do, just run around the block ten times? Or go to a gym or something?”
“I just sort of run,” Hugh said, discomforted by meeting her sympathetic interest with a lie; yet it never entered his head to try to tell her about the place he had found by the creek. “I’m sort of overweight. I thought I’d try it.”
“I guess you might be heavy for your age. You look fine to me,” Donna said, looking him up and down. Hugh was profoundly pleased.
“I’m fat,” he said, slapping his belly.
“A little podge, maybe. But look at all the bone you got to carry it on. Where do you get it? Your mom is such a little tiny thing, she’s so thin I can’t believe it, when she comes shopping here. Your dad must of been big, huh, you got your size from him.”
“Yeah,” Hugh said, turning aside to put on his apron.
“Is he dead, Hugh?” Donna asked, and there was a maternal authority to the question which he could not ignore or evade but was unable to answer adequately. He shook his head.
“Divorced,” Donna said, speaking the word as an ordinary one and an option certainly preferable to death; Hugh, to whose mother the word was an obscenity, unspeakable, would have agreed with relief but had to shake his head again. “Went off,” he said. “I got to help Bill with the crates.” And he went off. Went off, ran away, hid. Among the crates, among the imitation bacon bits and the green shifting and wink of the cash registers, anywhere, you could hide anywhere, and no place was any better than any other place.
But from time to time during the day’s work he thought of the water of the creek in his mouth and on his lips. He craved to drink that water again.
He took the idea Donna had given him home with him.
“Thought I’d get up early in the morning and jog,” he said at dinner. They ate on TV trays in front of the TV. “That’s why I got up early this morning. To try it. Only earlier would work better, I think. Five or six, maybe. When there’s no cars on the streets. And it’s cool. And that way I won’t bother you getting ready for work.” She was beginning to glance at him warily. “If you don’t mind me leaving before you do. I feel sort of out of shape. Standing around at the checkstand isn’t very good exercise, I guess.”
“More than you’d get sitting behind some desk all day,” she said, which surprised him as a flank attack; he had not mentioned library school or anything about library work for months, since before they left the last town. Maybe she just meant office work like her own. The knife’s edge was not in her voice, though it was sharp enough.
“Would it bother you if I got up and went out for a couple of hours real early? I can be back when you leave, and get my breakfast after you’ve gone to work.”
“Why should it bother me?” she said, glancing down at her thin shoulders to arrange the straps of her summer dress. She lighted a cigarette and looked at the television screen, where a reporter was describing an airplane crash. “You’re perfectly free to come and go, you’re twenty, nearly twenty-one years old, after all. You don’t have to consult me about every little thing you want to do. I can’t decide everything for you. The only thing I do insist on is not leaving the house empty at night, I did have a terrible shock night before last when I drove in and there were no lights on. It’s just purely a matter of common sense and consideration for others. It has just got to the point where a person can’t be safe in their own home even.” She had begun to speak tightly and to flip the filter end of her cigarette repeatedly with her thumbnail. Hugh was tense, dreading the next step towards the edge; but she said no more, watching the television intently. He did not dare pursue the subject. When he went to bed nothing further had been said. Ordinarily he would have heeded the threat of hysteria and not done whatever it was he wanted to do; but in this matter he was driven. It was thirst, he must drink. He woke at five, and was standing by his bed pulling his shirt on before he was fully awake.