When I look into his eyes, I see the same expression there as Grimshaw had the first time she looked at me in the cafeteria in sixth grade, wondering if I had what it takes to get across that great space in between us.

“Do you want to go see her grave? I haven’t seen it yet.”

“We could do that.”

“I have a car now.”

“That’s good,” he says. “’Cause I don’t.”

Grimshaw doesn’t seem like much for two people to have in common. If he had a truck, I could leave Versailles and ride around the country with him. I could visit factories where they make gaskets and potato chips, and stand on the bridges that staple a continent together and look down and watch history flow by under my feet. I could be a tourist. Nothing at stake. Just looking, just passing through. But he doesn’t have a truck. That’s what this road is about. Crying, giving your money away, that’s the easy part. As for the rest … maybe only people with no other choice have the courage to get across, and we should leave it to them.

But Grimshaw is dead, so that means I have to do it.

acknowledgments

Thank you to the many friends, readers, and fellow travelers for reading, commenting, encouraging, and generally hanging in over the course of the creation of this book. To Cowboy, the taxi driver in St. Louis who squired me to the Chain of Rocks Bridge on the Fourth of July and gave me some of the best lines in the book. To my students over the years for getting me to teach what I needed to learn. To my family for being such good storytellers. To the people of the Mohawk Valley of New York State. To the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts for their early support. And, most especially, to Wayland.

Thank you to my agent Sorche Fairbank for finding the book such a good home. A thank you to Christy Ottaviano for seeing the story’s potential, to Jessica Anderson for helping shape the book, and to them both for their belief in it. And thank you to the rest of the team at Henry Holt Books for Young Readers.

about the author

Stacia Tolman is a writer and freelance editor whose work has appeared in the Keen Sentinel and the Massachusetts Review, among other publications. She won a New Hampshire State Council on the Arts grant for fiction, based on an early excerpt of The Spaces Between Us. A former high school English teacher, Stacia lives in New Hampshire. You can sign up for email updates here.

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