Away From Everywhere by Chad Pelley

to bury herself in distractions. Monday night was movie night with the kids, Tuesday night was grocery night, even if they didn’t need groceries. She joined a book club and a cooking class. She eventually found salvation in volunteering all her spare time away. Having no spare time meant she never had to evaluate her life, or compare now to then.
    There was a battered women’s shelter three blocks from their home that needed a woman who could spare them twenty hours a week.“It’s a perfect match, it’s fate!”She told Nancy all about it and explained her role there to Owen like she’d just won the lottery.
    Helping out at the shelter initially distracted her, but over time she developed a genuine sense of purpose in being there. She started to feel alive again, and relevant. She befriended and almost mothered her assistant, Abbie Darenberg, and despite the two decades between their ages, they brought each back to life through their insightful, almost therapeutic discussions. She’d sit at the kitchen table, elbows on knees, with the phone in her hand, twirling the cord and laughing at Abbie for an hour or more each time she called. Owen would sit on the couch in the next room, pretending to be watching television, but not so secretly eavesdropping, smiling every time he heard his mother’s from-the-gut laugh.
    Within a few months, she was offered a full-time salaried position and took it. Owen was infinitely thankful to someone, or some thing , somewhere, for how her job had rejuvenated her. He noticed her shopping again, letting a few bright colours slip into her wardrobe. She’d stopped watching TV and started reading again. She started cooking nice meals, buying thick hardcovered cookbooks by the armload. Some nights, she and Abbie went out to the movies.
    When Owen and Alex got their licenses near the end of grade twelve, they begged and pleaded to be able to drop her off at work, so they could be one of the few kids who took a car to school. She agreed, largely because of the frequency of vandalism in her parking lot – the car was safer parked at the school – but also because she liked to grant her sons’ wishes whenever she could, as a sort of compensation for what had happened to their father. Every night, when she called them for a ride home, they’d flip a coin or argue about who had to go to pick her up. But the coin tosses and arguments died off after Owen met Abbie.
    Owen was waiting impatiently in the car, flipping through a CD leaflet, when he looked up and saw his mother waving a hand to him, signaling him to come in. He parked the car and she buzzed him into the building. It was a moderately secure building, since the boyfriends, husbands, or fathers of the abused women often showed up, demanding to speak to their “loved” ones. The door was a deep burgundy with chips of paint dangling from it, exposing the silver beneath. It was also spotted with dents left by the feral men it had successfully kept out.
    â€œCome in for a second, sweetie. I’m sorry, but we just got a new lady about five minutes ago, and I’ve got some paperwork to fill out. Wait in my office, have a cup of tea, and I think there’s a few donuts left in the Tim Hortons box on my assistant’s desk.”
    The second he walked into his mother’s office and saw Abbie, he decided that if she were going to be around whenever his mother needed a ride home, he would be the one to pick her up. He started showing up early, hoping for the chance to see her.
    Abbie was older than him, but not old enough to write the desire off as a fantasy. Her auburn hair blew like grass in the wind when she opened the window that day, and she never once tried to constrain it. She let the wind and sun do as they wished to her body. She bucked fashion and it worked for her. Her clothes, the way they clung to her, the way the wind tugged them against her,Owen could tell that what