No. Back in New York.
“This is my home, now,” I say as if speaking it out loud will help to convince myself. I try again, “This is where I want my home to be, now.”
That rings a little truer.
I stroke a thumb over the glass of the frame, and restate my reasons for moving out here. Even though my family and friends are all back in New York, the need to build something new for myself is like a hollow hunger in my gut. Mom’s house doesn’t feel right because Dad isn’t there. The track doesn’t feel right because of Nick’s accident, and of course David, his husband, is a constant reminder of the suffering that awaits me back home too. I had been spending every day feeling detached. Empty. Like I was encased in some unbreakable bubble. Even my apartment had only strengthened the effect. Every memory that I’d shared with Nick or David. Or my family. Every board game is tainted, every movie stained. I had felt myself shrinking into private isolation. Unable to connect with anything I’d once enjoyed, I’d been becoming less and less of a person with each passing day.
Everyone copes with grief differently.
That’s what people like to say.
For me, grief is like dying. And I refuse to lie down and just let it happen.
So, I had caught a plane. A plane that took me back to the hometown of my paternal grandparents. Where I might feel some sense of home that isn’t yet mutated by sorrow. A place in which I might build a haven and allow the hardened bubble to finally burst.
I’d felt a small sense of that the second I had stepped into the house on Oak Street. The one Caleb called the Jessop house. It’s run down, leaking its age along every seam, and desperately in need of some tender, loving care. But that’s only part of the attraction for me.
A house to match its owner.
So, I’d asked for the contracts on the spot. Perry Miller, the real estate agent, had been surprised at how impulsive I was, but he didn’t try to talk me out of it. I’m sticking to my guns.
The Jessop house would be My House. It will be my home. Where I can force my grief bubble to burst and engage with life again.
Alone.
As much as I’ve played with my attraction to Caleb Walker, the reality is that alone is better.
I only need to look at the little splatters of tears now speckling the photograph in my hands to know that another loss is impossible for me. That it will not only break me but shatter me so completely that I’d dissolve into nothing.
I don’t need loved ones right now. I need a home and I need friends. I need…
…to grab my damn pretzel napkin!
“Whoa there.” Rubbing my eyes and face clear, I snatch up the cloth before it can be blown any further down the street.
As I’m straightening, a clock nearby starts chiming one o’clock.
“Oh, shit!”
So much for having plenty of time before I need to catch my ride.
At lightning speed, I dump the napkin and the cardboard box in the nearest trash can, tuck the picture frame inside my coat for safekeeping and rush down the street that led me to the park in the first place.
Fifteen minutes later I reach our agreed meeting place, but there’s no sign of Caleb’s truck. There’s only a taxi, its driver looking hopeful at me for a fare, and a large family vehicle in which three children are poking one another despite yelling from their mother.
No Caleb. No truck.
He wouldn’t have left for the Forge without me?
I catch my breath as I look around to be sure of his absence. I hover for another ten minutes and then decide to go on the offensive. A few begging questions to the locals and I have directions to Yellow Fields Care Facility.
A half-hour later and I’m on the outskirts of town. I’m hot, sweaty, and panting billows of steam, but victory is in sight. Caleb’s russet-colored truck is sitting in the parking lot outside a building marked ‘Sunflower Ward’.
“Oh, thank God.”
At least I haven’t been abandoned. Most likely, Caleb has gotten caught up with his mom.
I try to keep my curiosity in check, and lean up against his truck, tucking my cold hands under my arms to wait.