bassinet when she was a baby—and now to a chain around her neck.
“People spend too much time chained to the clock anyway. On holiday, are you?” the traveler asked.
“Yes,” she said, “and looking for inspiration.”
“I thought you might be an artist.”
“What gave me away?”
“I can see it in your hands.”
She glanced at her fingers before tucking them in her pockets. “I wouldn’t make much of a hand model, would I?” she said.
“No need to be. They’re lovely hands, small, but capable. A callus here and there to let people know you mean business.”
“I used to.” She wasn’t so sure anymore, though she kept telling herself things would get better. “Tomorrow is another day,” her mother used to say, right up to the end.
The traveler handed her a handkerchief. “Thought you might want to dry your face a little, not that there’s much point until the weather stops carrying on like this.” He paused a moment, seeming to sense she was holding back. “You’re too young to give in to disappointment. The joy will come again, and when it does it will be all the better because of what you’ve suffered. Love is life, you know.”
Ethan had read that line to her, when they were studying for a test in their second English class. “Tolstoy,” she said faintly.
“The very one.” The traveler kept his eyes on the road while he talked, but it felt as if he were looking right through her.
“So you’re a reader of books—and people?” she asked.
“I like a good story.”
“It looks like you could run a mobile library with the collection you have back there.” She gestured to the stacks of books underneath the canvas cover, hardcover and paperback, well thumbed, by the look of them: Edna O’Brien, William Trevor, John Banville, James Joyce, Roddy Doyle, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Pynchon, among others.
“I have time for extensive reading. It improves the mind.”
“I love Edna O’Brien’s work, The Country Girls Trilogy in particular.”
“Of course you do. And Joyce?”
“Yes, though my mother was his biggest fan.”
“She must be a fine woman, your mother. Few are up to the challenge of taking him on.”
“Yes.” She gazed at the surrounding country, as if to see it with her mother’s eyes, the colors saturated as an oil painting, the sky dusky pearl over fields of foxglove and lupine and wild narcissus, the textured brushstrokes of velvet mosses and tussocks of shaggy green and gold, brilliant in the sun. And then the rain started again, extinguishing the light, the chill settling over her once more.
They sat in silence for a while. Kate listened to the tap of the rain on the canvas, on her hood, the traveler’s hat; the beat of the horse’s hooves, the jangle of the reins and bridle, the creak of the wheels, the wind in the grass. “I feel as if I’ve gone back in time,” she said.
“There’s a magic here, it’s true. That’s why I can’t leave this place. Not for long.”
“How do you make a living?” she asked.
“Other than as an amateur philosopher? No pay in that, that’s for certain.” He laughed. “I get by fixing things. There’s always something broken that needs to be fixed.”
They journeyed for hours, swaying to the rhythm of the wagon, tracing one of the minor routes taken by farmers and soldiers and pilgrims and seekers and famine survivors over the centuries. Kate dozed, dreaming of Ethan again. This time, he was hand in hand with someone new. She tried to call after him, not caring how she humiliated herself, but the sound wouldn’t come. As she struggled to speak, her body turned inside out, nothing left of her but a scrap of cloth, which a homeless woman picked up from the littered sidewalk and used to patch a hole in her jeans, a large needle in her roughened hands.
Get out of my subconscious! she wanted to shout. Instead, she woke, mouthing air like a beached fish, cheek pressed against a sack of grain.
“Bad dream?” the man asked.
She rubbed her eyes and sat up. “But only a dream.” She would not let it get the best of her. She shook off the dust of sleep and took in the scene at hand. The sky had cleared again, a gilded blue now, terns circling overhead. “It looks like heaven,” she said.
“Sometimes. Others hell, all gray and miserable. Never can tell what the next day will bring. At least it keeps things interesting.”
“Do you ever get tired of traveling?”
“Me? No. I was born to