Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

Chapter 53

        Rachel Elizabeth Hearn, who had always wanted to be called Suzanne, after her mother, and who loved her own eyes, which were her father’s, and who had made up her mind to save the money they’d left her so that she could someday, maybe, buy back some of the town she was leaving, looked down from her hill and knew that she would never come back here again.

“I want to leave now, quickly,” she said to Joe, taking the hammer out of his hand and throwing it into the back of her truck. It was hard for her to climb into the cab without looking back at her house, but when they had nailed up the last board she had turned her back, walked away carefully, had not once looked at the house and would not look at it now.

“Would you go back and lock the front door for me?” she asked from behind the wheel, holding the key out through the window.

So Joe went back to lock the front door, then climbed into the truck with her. As she drove down the hill, faster than she should, tears dripping off her jaw, Joe put the key into her purse. Then he reached into his pocket and took out the opal he’d been carrying with him for more than three years now. He held it low in his palm, looking at it, turning it slowly so that it flickered, and then put it, too, into her small bag.

When they reached the farm, Rachel helped him carry his things through the woods to his cabin. He didn’t have much. Only a few things that people had given him as they’d left town for good. Bits of wood for him to carve. Bits of Belle Haven.

“This is a wonderful cabin,” Rachel said, standing just inside the door. He had furnished it with simple, comfortable things. The floor was bare, the walls plain.

“I only spent a couple of nights here,” he said, “when I was up checking on how the houses were coming along.” He put down the things he was holding. “It belonged to one of the horse trainers,” he said, realizing suddenly that he’d told her this before. “The main farmhouse is on past where the lane turns off to come into these woods, over a rise and out of sight. The people who raised horses here still live there. They wanted to sell everything except the house and a couple of acres that it sits on. Didn’t think they’d ever find a buyer who would agree to let them stay. But I didn’t mind.”

He realized that he was talking but not really saying anything, so he took the things out of her arms and put them aside. “Do you want to see the place I had chosen for you?” he asked.

They walked back through the woods to the lane and along it, around a bend to where it ended in grass, then beyond that and across a small meadow surrounded by trees. Along the far edge of the meadow there was a narrow stream. The trees were brilliant, the grass still very green.

“And if I came back here someday, would it still be here, just like this?”

He looked straight at her. “You ask a lot,” he said.

“You seem to have a lot to give,” she replied.

“It will still be here. But don’t ever make me a promise you can’t keep.”

Afterward, they went to say good-bye to Angela and Rusty, Dolly, Earl, everyone she could find.

“Do you know where you’re going?” he asked when they reached the truck.

“Well, west. That’s all I know at the moment. Except that I made myself a promise once, right before my parents died, to go places. I don’t know which ones. I suppose I’ll know them when I get there.”

“I understand, probably better than you think.”

He handed her into the truck and kissed her through the window, not wanting to hold her, afraid if he did he would not be able to let her go.

January 14

San Francisco                                          

Dear Kit,

Having you with me for Christmas was wonderful. Much nicer than that August, really, when we were both in pretty bad shape. I only wish you could have stayed longer. But, as it turns out, you left just in time. Rachel arrived here the very next day.

I didn’t know she was coming. She just knocked on my door that morning, explained who she was, and said she really just wanted to meet me. She was on her way to Mendocino.

I gave her some lunch and asked her to stay for a day or two. She stayed for a week. We talked a lot about you, a lot about all of us, really. She told me so many things about you that I didn’t know. I felt as if we were talking about two different people.

I’m afraid I can’t tell you what her plans are … and I will let her be the one to tell you, when she’s ready, about the turns her life has taken. But I can assure you that she is all right, she is taking good care of herself, and she is doing all the sorts of things that I would be doing if I were her.

She spent Thanksgiving in Albuquerque, Christmas on the Baja, New Year’s in Carmel. She doesn’t know where she’ll go after Mendocino, but she probably won’t go on to Alaska as she had thought she might. She’s afraid of bears, she said.

I took her over to a shop in Sausalito to look at paintings and pots and other artsy stuff. All very nice. We walked in, she looked around, saw a shelf on the wall fifteen feet away and knew, immediately, that she was looking at your carvings. It really shook her when she turned one over and found “Christopher Barrows” on the bottom. After a while she turned to me and said, “A good way to make a living.”

The next day, whenever we talked about you, she practiced