Read Between the Spark and the Burn for Free Online

four-star hotels for us.
    Not that they had those where we were headed, anyway.
    My parents came out to tell us good-bye. Luke said we were going to Virginia to inspire the muse, and they asked no follow-up questions, which was typical. Sunshine’s parents put up more of a fight, one with quotes and big words and bookish hues, which was also typical.
    Sam: “Sunshine, peanut, you are unaccustomed to traversing the wider world unaccompanied. While travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, as the wise man Twain once said, I still believe you are too young to go romping about in foreign places by yourself.”
    Sunshine: “Dad, you are being very condescending.”
    Cassie: “
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room, and hermits are contented with their cells.
William Wordsworth. A brilliant man.”
    Sunshine (batting her sleepy eyes): “Mom, I don’t even know where to start with that one.”
    A pause.
    Sunshine:
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the road less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.”
    Sam, to Cassie: “We’ve created a monster.”
    Sunshine sealed the deal by telling them the road trip was for “personal edification about the Civil War” and they backed right down. Sunshine had never been very scholarly, but her parents were both librarians and readers and knowledge-seekers, and she knew how to hit them where it counted.
    Jack was still sulking in his room. We weren’t letting him come with. I wasn’t going to put him within a hundred miles of Brodie, or anything that sounded like it could be Brodie. Not on my life. But at the last minute he ran down the steps of Citizen Kane and threw himself into my arms in a giant bear hug.
    I was going to miss the kid, damn it.
    Luke tried to take the front seat, but Sunshine made him get in the back with her. So I got to be up with Neely. I waved good-bye to Jack and my parents and the snow-covered fountain girls and the frostbitten Citizen Kane. The wheels beneath me crunched over snow and gravel. We turned out of the driveway, and it began.
    River, I’m leaving the sea. Can you even picture me without the ocean nearby? We’re going to Virginia. Maybe you’re there right now. Maybe you’re glowing up all of Inn’s End even though you promised not to. We’ll find you in a cemetery, making a group of kids see dragons or witches or madmen, and then Neely and you will get into a fight and then me and you will get into a fight . . . But then we’ll both forgive you because we always do. You’ll make espresso and tell me some lie about how you own an island in the middle of the ocean where children run wild and live on nothing but coffee beans and I’ll half believe you and then you’ll lean over and kiss my neck and I won’t care about anything anymore.
    We listened to Billie Holiday and Skip James and Robert Johnson and Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt, and the white snow and brown, bony trees went on and on.
    When we started curving away from the coast, I felt it. The tug that meant I was leaving the sea behind.
    Freddie took Luke and me on a trip to Montreal when I was little. She went to visit an old friend and we were taken along to “experience some culture.” I remember feeling the tug back then too, when we started going inward . . . like the moon pulling in the tides. If you’re born near the sea, you’re bound to it for life, I guess.
    We stopped in a couple of quiet small towns to stretch our legs. We ate lunch sitting on the freshly shoveled steps of a small white church in some quaint Connecticut town. The sun was shining and it wasn’t as cold as it could have been—it was warmer away from the ocean. I’d packed a lot of food in the large wicker picnic basket. Butter and radish sandwiches, and olives, and Gouda, and dark chocolate, and apples and