She was jogging down the steps. A hand wiped her face.
He had expected this, right? He should have. He knew she was going to go
back. He had just gotten so used to having her around, even though he knew Chicago was where she belonged. It was where she'd always wanted to be.
Do something. Do something really romantic. Run after her. Tackle her.
Throw roses at her. Grab her and kiss her and carry her to your car while the
factory workers cheer.
Stop her.
He let her go. Down the walkway to the lot. Into her car. It backed out, paused, went forward, and she was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kate rushed to Carol's house only long enough to pick up her luggage and cram
it in the back seat of her car. She wasn't sure that Carol bought her excuse when
she explained that she needed to get back to Chicago tonight. Yes, the presentation had gone fine, but there was a lot of work that needed to still be done.
Her yellow VW bug floated down I-88 silently. The road was straight and smooth. Inside, she was trying to keep her mind on driving. She flipped through
radio stations and iPhone playlists, but every song just seemed to annoy her.
The countryside flowed by, dull, lifeless, monotonous. She saw white
farmhouses with pill-shaped propane tanks by their sides. Red combines in the fields rotating, churning chaff into the air. She saw a rusted windmill struggling to move in the breeze. She started to cry and she didn't know why, and it scared
her.
Her car cruised along. Night was falling, slow and dull. Chicago crept back
into her life, slowly, each building growing higher and closer to its neighbor, until all that was left was concrete, asphalt, and skyscrapers. A place that had once seemed exciting and alive now looked noisy, cheap, and lifeless. Nothing had changed, she knew, except maybe her.
A night's rest in her rumpled bed had helped some, but she was so exhausted
she probably could have slept on an “L” platform.
After she parked her car in the office garage, she fixed her makeup and summoned her game face. Her office was the same. Clean, antiseptic, to the point, and ready for work. Back to work, she thought. That's what she needed.
That was what got her here.
Which was where, exactly? Up this “ladder” she kept talking about? A
bigger office, with better pay, longer hours, and shorter weekends? For what?
All day, she kept finding herself picturing herself in a tidy office in Golden
Grove. Maybe above the bakery, with wooden floors, the smell of fresh bread drifting up, a morning croissant with a to-go cup from The Screamin' Bean sitting next to her. Working on a big-screen computer. Not crunching numbers,
but design work. Nothing big, just enough to pay the bills and have some time to
herself.
After her last droning meeting, she closed her computer and stared out the
tall glass window. It was gray outside, no clouds, no rain, just gray. Golden Grove seemed like another world, like Narnia or Oz. Like something you needed
to step through a magic wardrobe or fly in a tornado to get to.
Like the souvenir snow globe perched on the corner of her desk. She picked
it up. Tiny orange and red leaves floated in slow motion past old brick houses and a church with a perfect white steeple. Just something you absentmindedly picked up and shook, then put back on the shelf before you returned to real life.
She should have known better. It was just supposed to be a job. A few weeks, maybe a month. Peter wasn't supposed to become her friend again. They
weren't supposed to sit by the old treehouse or look up at the stars. He wasn't supposed to kiss her. It should have all been done by now, but instead, it was all scattered. Like fallen leaves or the past or the glass from a ruined mobile.
For an instant, she thought about going back tonight. Getting in the car and
driving, all the way, back to the snow globe town, back to his house. Up his front porch and into his arms.
Then she realized why she had cried yesterday. It was loss. Loss of the past,
etched forever for good or bad. Loss of the future, unknown and unknowable.
