Read Online Hugo & Rose by Bridget Foley - Free Book Online Page A

Hugo in real life.
    Hugo.
    Hugo.
    Hugo.
    The van was filled with the smell of fried potatoes and salt. The children ate quietly, listening to the rain hit the roof of the van, a tin tap-tapping the only sound. Rose’s mind raced.
    *   *   *
    Years before, when she was pregnant with Isaac, Rose had seen her aunt Barbara walking away from her in the international foods aisle of the grocery store.
    What’s she doing here? Rose had thought, delighted at the unexpected chance to catch up.
    She had gotten as far as shouting “Bar—” when she remembered that Barb was dead. That she had been dead nine years, since an aneurysm had quietly plucked her from life. That Rose had helped her cousin pick the jewelry Barb’s corpse would wear for the viewing. That she had let the flowers from the church wilt in the heat of her car during the gathering afterward at her uncle’s home, and when she returned to it that night, it had smelled overwhelmingly of lilies, stale water, and floral foam.
    The woman at the other end of the aisle stopped and turned toward the stilted sound Rose had made. Rose’s eyes met hers for a moment, and the details that had made her “Barb” melted away in the contradictions. The high-waisted jeans over the flat landscape of her butt, the dry ginger cast of her hair, the slight hitch in her gait: The “Barb-ness” of her was still there, but it was subsumed by the “not-Barb-ness.” The angle of her eyes. The gray cast of her skin. The slackness of her face.
    The woman had looked away quickly and Rose had shuddered, pretending to study the rack of lasagna noodles while she composed herself.
    Later, when she told Josh about the encounter, he had said that that sort of thing happened because the brain was a “pattern recognition machine,” but it was a lazy one. Rose’s brain had taken a shortcut, its best guess given the stimuli it was given ( ass, hair, walk ), and sent a ghost down the aisle of the Piggly Wiggly.
    When Rose had said it was “spooky anyway,” Josh had grinned and said the human brain was the spookiest thing he could imagine. “It’s all dark corridors and creaky staircases,” he had said in a mock dark voice before launching himself onto her with a kiss.
    Sitting in the parking lot of the Orange Tastee, Rose tried to use the memory of Josh’s voice to slow the heart racing beneath her seat belt.
    To a brain, a person is nothing more than a pattern. A collection of stimuli … What had Josh called it? A neural pathway.
    That’s what had happened.
    Rose racked her mind for the details that would melt him away. The “un-ness” that had dissolved Barb that day in the grocery store.
    They did not come.
    Maybe if I just got another look at him …
    But she shook that thought off as soon as it arrived. Barb at least had been real. She had once been a living, breathing human with children and a wicked tennis serve.
    But Hugo?
    Hugo was never real. Rose was not asleep and on the beaches of her dreamland. She was conscious and sitting in her car in a shitty small town in eastern Colorado.
    *   *   *
    The tournament was canceled. Isaac’s coach sent a mass text, which Rose received just as the kids were finishing up their meal.
    Isaac took the news better than expected. The unfinished game defaulted in his team’s favor, meaning that the winning goal had been his.
    Rose drove them home on the rain-slick highway, stopping halfway at a gas station for a potty break. The boys begged to buy candy from metal display shelves, a wish that Rose uncharacteristically granted, handing each a dollar.
    She put a mix of children’s music into the player for the rest of the ride. The boys sang along to the songs about planets and paleontologists, listing the colors of the rainbow. They ate their candy bars and looked for Volkswagen Beetles on the highway. Penny