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By Root 1347 0

night in an empty, anonymous house, Cordy sleeping on a racked-out couch that pressed its frame urgently into her back. When she awoke coffee-shop early, she wandered the house, no different from a hundred others she’d slept in before. At some point it would have been inherited upon the death of a parent, and taken over by some slacker with only the mildest of intentions to update the tired décor. But then the furniture began to swell with the bodies of friends just passing through, and the refrigerator filled with beer instead of food, and the screened porch was speckled with the tiny ends of hand-rolled cigarettes, and it became a way station instead of a home, and it just wasn’t worth fighting anymore. And though Cordy had certainly been grateful for houses like this time and time again, they always left her feeling bleak and a little empty, as though she were walking away from a mewling stray kitten.

And then they drove to a festival in a park miles from anywhere she knew, another of a million attempts to re-create Woodstock with a cast too self-conscious to stage an effective revival. Cordy was sitting in a tent with Max and some of his friends, and trying hard to remember what it was she had hated enough about Barnwell to have forced her here. She should be at her shift at the Beanery right now, she thought, and the idea of that place made her ache with longing—the smell of the coffee, the clatter of silverware, the way the sound rose and fell during the day from sleepy early risers to the bubble of the lunch crowd to the purr of afternoon lingerers. Had she really fallen madly in love . . . with a coffee shop?

Cordy sighed and leaned back against a pile of backpacks in the corner, resting her hand on her belly, stroking it slowly. No matter how much she loved the Beanery, it wasn’t hers anymore. She’d blown that by taking off. She looked over at Max, who was staring at her stomach intently.

“You’re pregnant,” Max observed.

This brilliant thought had taken him over a day to assemble.

“It happens,” Cordy said.

“Not to me,” Max said vaguely. Cordy wondered whether he meant that literally, that he was somehow surprised that he had never been pregnant, or just that he had never had the pleasure of knocking someone up.

“So are you on the kick again?” he asked. A boy—he was a boy, really, lanky and red-eyed, with patchy stubble on his cheeks—stumbled into the tent and collapsed on one of the sleeping bags in the back, promptly falling asleep with his leg draped unceremoniously over Cordelia’s thighs like a disobedient lapdog.

She hadn’t heard that phrase in a while. People had all sorts of names for that world, where you rolled from town to town like tumbleweeds, following bands, following dreams, following lovers, following stars. But Max had always called it being “on the kick,” given his penchant for getting kicked out of places for minor issues like refusing to pay his hotel bill.

“I don’t know,” Cordy said. Suddenly the tent felt close and hot, the sunshine through the red nylon making Max’s hollow cheeks glow in an eerie trace of veins and blood. “I need . . .” She pushed the boy’s leg roughly off her own, stood up and opened the tent flap to emerge into the air.

The stage was far away, beyond a small copse of trees that hid the campsite’s restrooms and showers, and the music was only a dull blur of thumps and shouting. A group of people played hacky sack by a cluster of tents and camp chairs. A young woman near a battered RV was rinsing laundry under a spigot. Her blond dreadlocked hair tangled down her back, looking thick and dirty in the fading afternoon light. Behind her, a toddler wobbled unsteadily around a broken camp chair. Cordy’s fist opened and closed.

The woman looked up at Cordy, her face wearing the mask of a woman twenty years older. Cordy’s hand went to her own throat, stroking the bones gently. She could do it. She could raise a child on the kick, bring it up on the open road and bands and starlight campfires in the desert. It would grow up open-minded and free, a leaf on the wind.

And