Chapter 27 #2
When she returned to her office, Marcy was at her desk.
Emma looked at the plant one more time.
“You know that plant has been yours for six years. You just didn’t know it.”
Marcy laughed.
“Take your plant and get out of here.”
Priya got a babysitter Saturday night and arrived at Emma’s apartment with a bottle of wine.
She stayed until almost midnight.
Emma had spent most of the day sorting through closets and making piles. Ship. Donate. Keep for now.
The apartment looked worse than when she started.
“I’m only taking a few things back this time,” Emma said. “I’ll have to come back and finish everything.”
“You know I’ll help.”
“I know.”
Priya looked around the living room. “What are best friends for if not helping you pack up your entire life so you can leave me forever?”
Emma knew she was only half joking.
“I’m not leaving you forever.”
“You’re moving twelve hundred miles away.”
“Geography doesn’t get that much power. I’ll come back here. You’ll come to Key West. You’re going to be in my life when we’re ninety and complaining about something neither of us understands.”
Priya smiled. “Good answer.”
They ordered Indian food from Priya’s favorite restaurant and ate on the floor because Emma had covered the dining table with boxes.
They talked about work, Priya’s family and whether Emma should keep a chair she had never liked simply because it had cost too much.
Before Priya left, she set her wineglass down.
“I want to ask you something.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“I’m serious.”
Emma waited.
“Are you moving toward something or away from something?”
A month earlier, Emma might have needed time to answer, but not now.
“Toward.”
“You’re sure?”
“I am.”
Priya studied her.
Emma thought about Gloria’s cottage and the people who had made room for her before she understood she needed them. She thought about Jake.
“I know what I want. I don’t know exactly what it’ll look like yet, but I know where I want to be.”
Priya nodded.
“That’s enough.”
The storage unit on Clybourn was eight feet by ten.
Emma stood outside it Sunday morning with the key in her hand.
She hadn’t opened the door since the month after her mother died.
For nine years, she had paid the monthly charge and told herself she would deal with everything when she had more time. Standing there now, Emma understood that time had never been the problem.
She unlocked the door.
Most of what she expected was still there. Furniture from the Evanston house filled one side. Four boxes held Ruth’s teaching files. A rolled rug leaned against the wall beside a lamp with a good shade and a terrible base.
Emma smiled when she saw it.
Her mother had refused to throw that lamp away for twenty years.
The box Emma wanted was against the back wall.
Ruth’s handwriting had faded to brown around the edges of the marker.
David’s things. Keep.
Emma sat on the concrete floor with her back against the teaching files and opened it.
There were photographs in a folder and a watch that had stopped. Her father’s wallet was worn pale at the fold. Two paperbacks had his name written inside in the handwriting of a much younger man.
Emma touched each thing before setting it beside her.
Then she saw the newspaper.
It was from 1996 and wrapped around something the way Ruth had always wrapped fragile things. Too much paper. Too much tape.
Emma peeled it away carefully.
The model sat in her lap.
She wasn’t sure what she was looking at.
It was about the size of a bread box. Her father had built it from scrap pine and painted it carefully. The little house had one story, a narrow front porch and two windows across the front. Black shutters framed the windows.
The porch railing had tiny balusters cut one at a time.
Beside the house stood a tree made from a piece of dowel and green felt. It leaned slightly to one side.
Emma stopped breathing.
She knew that porch.
She knew those windows.
The model had sat on her mother’s dresser for Emma’s entire childhood. She had seen it thousands of times and never once understood what it was.
Her father had built the cottage on Hibiscus Lane.
Emma held it with both hands.
The first tears came quietly. Then she cried hard enough that she had to set the model beside her so she wouldn’t drop it.
No one was there to see her.
For once, Emma was glad.
When the crying finally stopped, she sat with one hand resting on the little porch roof.
David had built it before she was born, or close to it. He had given it to Ruth, and Ruth had kept it on her dresser for thirty years.
Maybe her mother had told Emma what it was when she was little.
Maybe Emma had been four and forgotten.
She looked at the tiny house.
Her father had carried the cottage with him too.
“All right, Dad,” Emma whispered.
She sat there a little longer before wrapping the model in Ruth’s newspaper.
At the rental car, Emma put it carefully on the passenger seat and fastened the seat belt around it.
She knew it was ridiculous.
She did it anyway.
Then she went back for the photographs, the watch, the wallet and the two paperbacks.
The rest could wait.
Emma flew back Thursday with the model house in a carry-on she refused to check.
When she landed in Miami, the temperature was eighty-eight degrees and she felt it when she walked out of the terminal. By the time she reached the rental car, she was already thinking about the drive south.
She placed the model carefully in the back seat.
For most of her adult life, returning from a trip had meant going back to Chicago. Back to work, her apartment and the life waiting exactly where she had left it.
This time was different.
Emma started the car and headed toward Key West.
Toward the cottage.
Toward Jake.
Toward home.