The woman from the post office studied the postcard again. “Tell you what. The house is still there, you know. Amelia’s house.”
Selena looked at her blankly, one hand hooked under the dog’s collar.
“Nobody’s claimed it,” said the woman. “She’s got no kin around here, and it’s not a big house. And you look about done in, if you don’t mind me saying so. No reason you can’t stay there for the night. Or however long you need.”
Selena had to think for a minute, to put the words together. She tried them out in her head a few times, then said, “Is that allowed?”
“Sure,” said the post office woman. “I said it was fine, didn’t I?” She grinned. “I’m the mayor, you know. Also the postmaster, fire marshal, and the chief of police. My name’s Jenny.”
She stuck out a hand and Selena shook it. Shaking hands was polite, and if she was careful, she wouldn’t start to overthink whether she’d been shaking too long or not long enough.
She didn’t want to babble or dominate the conversation, but surely she could ask one more question. “You’re sure no one will mind if I stay there?”
“Nobody aroundtomind,” said Jenny. “Lotta places standing empty these days. Can’t keep people in ’em. You know how it is.”
Selena didn’t have the least idea how it was and didn’t know where to start asking, so she simply nodded and hoped that Jenny wouldn’t have any follow-up questions.
“You’re next door to Grandma Billy, out past the old well, and then there’s nothing for a mile on. You’ll have to check the old solars, but they should be working well enough to make tea, and you ain’t gonna need heat for a couple of months yet.” She leaned back on her hands.“Give it a look over. If you’re inclined to stay, just come by the post office and let me know. I’ll make you out an address form.”
An address form? For what? Is she suggesting I move in? I can’t do that. Houses are expensive. People with houses are always complaining about it. You can’t buy a house with twenty-seven dollars. Even if they gave it to me, I couldn’t keep it. The roof will fall off and the walls will fall down and I’ll have no money and they’ll hate me for not taking care of it. And it’s stupid to think anyway, because nobody gives away houses.
“I can’t stay,” said Selena. She had no money and apparently no family either. She’d have to leave, go back, deal with what she found in the city. With Walter. Running away hadn’t solved anything.
“Up to you,” said Jenny. “Train won’t be back till tomorrow, though, so you might as well walk over and take a look.” She pointed down one of the roads. “’Bout half a mile that way. Grandma Billy’s the one with the blue door, and you’re the one just past it.”
“Thank you,” whispered Selena, her store of words exhausted.
Jenny, the mayor and the postmistress and the fire marshal and the chief of police, smiled at her and said, “It’s called Jackrabbit Hole House. You can’t miss it.”
Chapter 2
In the end, she went because the alternative was to sit on the post office porch until the sun went down. She had no real hope for Jackrabbit Hole House. (And what kind of outlandish name was that, anyway?)
Truth was, she had only met her aunt a handful of times, mostly as a teenager. She remembered a thin woman with a seamed face, wearing clothes that were too big for her, as if she was afraid that someone might grab her and she’d have to wriggle away. But she had a sharp, cutting sense of humor that delighted the teenage Selena, and over the years, postcards had come from a dozen places. It was only the last few that had come from the same place, as if she had been caught at last.
The last postcard was nearly three years old now. It had ended with “I hope you can come out and visit me sometime.”
Selena had been putting all her faith in those ten words.
What am I going to do now?
There were no answers on the post office porch, and if she kept sitting there, Jenny was going to keep sitting with her. Someone who had so many jobs was undoubtedly busy, even in a town as small as Quartz Creek, and Selena had taken up enough of her time.
“Straight down that road,” said Jenny, pointing again. “If you don’t like what you see, come on back. There’s a potluck at the church Wednesdays and Saturdays, everybody welcome.”
Selena nodded. “Thank you,” she said. That was about all she could trust herself to say.
People are telling me where I can get free food. Oh god, how much farther can I fall? I had a job, I always had jobs, I’m thirty years old and I should be able to take care of myself ...
Selena believed, with every fiber of her being, that a person’s worth was not defined by how hard they worked or how productive they managed to be. She also believed just as strongly that this did not apply to her.
There really ought to be some kind of card, Selena decided, something you could carry to prove that you weren’t a freeloader. It could say something like, “Hard Worker, Temporarily Fallen on Bad Times.” And on the reverse it would say, “Not in the Habit of Mooching.”
All it took was one run of bad luck and it didn’t matter how hard you’d worked your whole life, you were down in the gutter with the broken and the unlucky and the professionally helpless. And it hadn’t even been bad luck, in Selena’s case, just a sudden mad dash for freedom.
Maybe the Walter in her head was right and she’d done something foolish and needed someone to save her.
“Definitely a card,” she muttered as she walked down the bleached road, dragging the suitcase. Then she stopped, because if you talked to yourself, you looked crazy—and even though shewascrazy, she was still kind of hoping that nobody else would notice.
