Page 94 of Every Beautiful Mile

I click around on my phone until I find an available house.

“I found one! It’s perfect. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms… walkable to downtown!”

I perk up.

“Tony wasn’t wrong about how expensive it is, but it’s totally fine.”

Marin and Finn lean over my shoulder and look at the pictures.

“It has a washer and dryer. God bless America. I need to put my head in there after that ride with Tony,” Marin says.

A few clicks on my screen and a disgusting amount of money later, we have a mint green house with cheery floral landscaping in the middle of downtown Bar Harbor reserved for the next three weeks. I’m so excited I almost forget about all our stuff, mangled up RV, lack of transportation, and all-around terrible situation.

Eventually, we have a plan.

Using trash bags for luggage, we grab all our clothes, shoes, and a couple of the blankets that Marin and I had fallen in love with. Marin gets her microscopic bag of gold and the old-timey photo. I take the enormous canvas from the farmer’s market.

Finn gives me a look like, seriously? And I raise my eyebrows, daring him to challenge me on it.

I negotiate with the owner of the repair shop for him to keep the camper and scrap out the pieces if he just takes it off our hands.

While we wait for the Uber to come, a crushing feeling sweeps over me as I look at the Avion. I had come to hate the stupid camper—the size, heat, and all-around inconvenience of it—but it was also the vehicle that had carried all my broken pieces around and allowed me to slowly start putting them back together.

The air conditioner breaking while driving across the desert is one of the more awful things I have experienced in life, but it was Travis’ dream. He had picked it up, brought it home, and planned a trip. Now it’s going to be ripped to pieces and sent to a junkyard. It seems as if the most depressing moments of my life revolve around wreckage.

We’ll figure out how to get home, but this is the end of something. Surrounded by trash bags on the side of this Maine road, it feels an awful lot like goodbye.

“Mom?”

Sadness makes me sluggish as Marin leans on me.

“It’s goodbye, Mar.”

She looks at the Avion and wraps her arm around me.

“It is. But you know what?” She tilts her face toward me. “He would have loved everything we did and didn’t do.”

Finn stands next to us and looks at the mangled mess of metal in shades of 70s whites and browns and smiles.

“Thanks for the fun, Dad.”

Marin loops her arm through his, and we all stand there, knowing without saying it, something is changing.

“Uber’s here.”

Finn holds up my phone and points to the SUV that’s parked beside us.

“Goodbye, Travis.” It’s barely a whisper.

Holding the too-big canvas in the backseat, I stare out the window at the camper until it’s out of sight.

As guilty as I feel, there’s an unexpected relief, too.

Thirty-five

The showers we take when we get to the rental house are so long that we run out of hot water twice. I splurge on a bath in the claw-foot tub and want to spend the entire three weeks there.

Exhausted, we order pizza. The whales and puffins and lobsters will have to wait for another day.

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