There are so many different ways to be homesick, she’s discovering. There’s the obvious kind: the textbook definition where you miss your parents and your home This is the kind she felt when she was 12 and spent three weeks at Camp Watama on Lake Wentworth in New Hampshire. Her tentmate was a girl named Cammy Mason from Short Hills who wore sparkly eyeshadow and liked to brag about how she had already watched Dirty Dancing with her older sister’s friends. Cammy’s brash confidence made her feel small and inexperienced and homesick for her two best friends still preferred to play board games and watch old episodes of I Dream of Jeannie when they had sleepovers.
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On their fourth date, he tells her about his ex-girlfriend, a woman named Marisa Donicio who now runs a winery in Sonoma. This doesn’t bother her as much as she thought it would, and she finds herself happy to listen as he describes the way Marisa used to floss her teeth in the middle of a movie, a sign he describes as a red flag so flagrant that it appears crimson in hindsight.
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She waits for a long, slow second. It stretches like taffy into another second, then another, until nearly half a minute has elapsed. The silence becomes so meaningful that she can picture it like expanding like a balloon, taking on more air as it swells uncomfortably.
“Okay,” she says stiffly, the word coming out crisp and business-like: the verbal equivalent of rapping sharply on the top of a creme brulee, cracking the sweet candy coating around her heart.
“It’s not…I’m sorry. I tried but I can’t change it,” he stumbles over his words but rather than sounding apologetic, he sounds impatient, like he’s placating a child and wishes to be done with it.
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The television is on with the volume muted in the waiting room. She tries to avoid looking at it, concentrating instead on the magazine in her lap — a back issue of the New Yorker open to an article on tracking musk oxen in the Alaskan wilderness — but the persistent neon flashing proves impossible to ignore.
She sighs, and sets the magazine aside, folding one leg up underneath the other and adjusting her weight in the overstuffed chair. The news anchor’s million-watt smile fills the screen, just above the ticker tape of breaking updates scrolling slowly at the bottom of the frame. All anyone is talking about is the storm: up to 19 inches predicted for Pembroke, 24 for downtown Boston, and Sharon forecast to be inundated with almost 30.
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The first time the phone rings, she doesn’t hear it.
The second time it rings, she picks it up on the third ring and says breathlessly, “What happened?”
His voice comes across the line, deep and happy, and she can picture him smiling as he answers. “It worked! We’re celebrating. If, that is, you’re free.”
She glances out of the window where the snow is falling thick and fast, the flakes so fat and heavy it’s as if they can barely stay aloft. The afternoon is tilting rapidly towards dusk, and the curtain of snow obscuring the city only serves to hasten the departure of daylight.
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