The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

but neither he nor his father would budge. If he hadn’t been mandated to sit on the stiff living-room furniture with his schoolwork in front of him every moment the old man was home, and if he hadn’t been banned from whittling rabbits, nice basswood figures he’d spent hours on in his room, he likely would have relented eventually and headed off to meet his fate at Woodberry Forest. But instead, he ran away.
    He didn’t get far—his friend Spencer’s room on the other side of the state highway—but after the night he spent tossing on Spencer’s chilly floor, everything changed. Judge Hill, at his wife’s urging, decided to disengage from his youngest entirely. For Anders, there was surprisingly little difference between his father engaged and his father disengaged, except that now during meals his father would reach across him for the salt and talk right over him and leave the table cluttered with dishes for Anders to bus. But that wasn’t so bad, because Anders no longer had to do anything for school, it turned out, so long as he didn’t ask his father for so much as a pencil. So when the time finally came, he applied to college without speaking a word to his parents, writing away to schools as far north as he could find and accepting an offer from one whose name they wouldn’t know how to pronounce.
    And so began the project of remaking himself. This meant working—for the college, yes, but also at a pancake house in town, where he picked up dishwashing shifts, and at an inn out in Harpswell, where he spent the weekends changing the linens and running the graveyard shift—all of which were time-consuming and menial but soon became a compulsion for him, necessary, as though the harder he worked on jobs that, as a judge’s son, he should never have had to take, the farther away all of the expectations of that life became. His days stretched for eighteen and twenty hours, during which he shoveled walkways or laid sod or sprayed scalding-hot water on dishes that were glued with syrup, and while he made enough money to eat, he had little to say to his classmates, much less to the only daughter of an orthopedic surgeon from Wellesley, Massachusetts, who was already surrounded by men.
    That is, until he got back to his dorm one night and she was sitting on his sofa. She was wearing old sweatpants and a green track T-shirt that was worn down to its final gauzy threads. Her hair was loose and she was hugging her knees, which had a can of beer held between them. Normally his manners would have compelled him to introduce himself, but he had been working at the inn since Friday night and now that it was technically Sunday morning, he had the energy only to walk past her, pull off his boots, and collapse into the chair at his desk.
    “Are you asleep?” she asked eventually.
    He shook his head, but it wasn’t until he heard the sound of the toilet flushing that he opened his eyes.
    “Are you here with Donny?”
    “Um”—she glanced around as though checking to see who was listening—“it’s not official or anything.”
    Anders slumped back in his chair. “He didn’t tell me.”
    “I’m Helene.”
    “I know.”
    She smiled. “You’re reading my favorite book.” She gestured to a paperback edition of Middlemarch on his desk, easily the fattest book he’d been assigned.
    “I didn’t actually read that.”
    She drained the rest of her beer. “Where are you from?”
    “Because I haven’t read Middlemarch ?”
    “Because I’m trying to be polite.”
    Anders smiled. “North Carolina.”
    “Long way from home. You miss it?”
    “God, no,” he said. It was the first time anyone had suggested such a thing. “I hate it there.”
    She blinked a few times with a warm sort of smile, as though he’d just confessed something deeply intimate. “When people say things like that they’re usually just talking about their parents.”
    Anders raised his eyebrows. “You should start charging for