For twenty-four years she had thought about that man. Every decision, every desire, every need, had been wrapped around him.
She had left because she didn’t want to know what he was doing.
But it also meant she was free to just not think about him at all.
“I’m done talking about him,” she said. She sat up straight and took her wedding rings off. “This isn’t about him. It can’t be.”
She stuffed the ring and the band into a zipper pocket in her purse, her hand feeling weird, the ratio of her ring finger just wrong.
This wasn’t forever. It was for the summer.
“He’s in Oregon,” she said, leaning her head back against the seat. “I’m going on my road trip. He doesn’t get to come with me.”
SIX
They made it to Santa Clara around two thirty. Logan was a ruthless navigator who kept all stops to the bare minimum.
“I want to sightsee when we’re actually on Route 66,” she said as they pulled onto campus and tried to follow Chloe’s directions to her student housing.
“We will. But there’s no sightseeing I want to do along I-5, and we have to have time to visit with Chloe and get to Bakersfield before it gets too late.”
“Because we’d hate to miss the stunning attractions in Bakersfield?” she asked dryly.
“Because we need to get there at a reasonable time, to get up early, to get on the road,” he said, as if he were talking to a child.
Then again, he usually did this with Chloe.
When they pulled into visitor parking, he texted and waited for Chloe to give them the okay before they started to head up to her room.
Before they did, he took the box out of the trunk. “What did you bring her?” she asked.
“Just stuff.”
She rolled her eyes as she followed him into the building and tried not to think about how weird it was that she was visiting Chloe in her dorm. She could remember when she was a little girl, and yes, all her boys were grown too, but it was weirder sometimes when it was someone else’s child you’d known forever.
She hadn’t gone to college, but she’d now moved all three of her sons into dorms and knew they were all like this, even if they looked totally different. Filled with school pride, and also the naked resentment of said school pride, teenage panic and hormones.
She didn’t miss being young.
Because being older is so much better?
Ithadbeen.
Shit, now she was basically a teenager in a forty-year-old body.
Yet again, she questioned Will’s sanity.
Why would you sign up for debilitating insecurityandunexplainable neck pain?
She was also old enough to know life wasn’t made to order. She was still human enough to resent it.
They got into the elevator and took it to the second floor, where Chloe’s room was. There was a living area up there with kids lying on the cheap furniture. It didn’t remind her of college. It reminded her of being a poor newlywed, with the perfect combination of cheap furniture from box stores and free furniture from family members and elderly people in the neighborhood.
She and Will had had a pair of shocking-looking floral couches that they’d gotten from an older man down the road when his wife had died. They’d tried their best to put slipcovers on them, but the slipcovers were—by necessity—cheap, and they never stayed. In hindsight, the couches had looked like they were sloppily covered in black blankets. The floral couch would have been better, but she’d thought they were old lady, and at the time she was so committed to this life she was making.
The one where she was an adult. She wouldn’t have flower garlands and roosters and the things her mother thought were cute that Sam thought were dust catchers. She’d been all about sleek things. Black and red. Then brown and teal.
She’d been nothing if not a victim of early 2000s style.
