But Sam was done crying for the lost city and her lost love. All the tears left were for her lost father.
“I need to figure out who I am, and I can’t do that with you around. I’m sorry.” It was the most honest thing Sam had said in a long time.
As she turned away to head back up the concrete path that meandered between lines of headstones like gapped teeth, Raul pleaded, unaware that he was about to light a fire in her that would never quite burn out.
“Wait. Please. This isn’t about me, it’s about you. You once told me you wanted to make a difference in the world with your plants and your writing.”
“And I had meant it when I said it. But that’s gone now, Raul.” The weight of the admission felt heavy in her steps, just as the weight of her father’s burial felt heavy in her tears. “My stupid plants couldn’t save my dad, and my writing won’t save the world. It’s all pointless.”
“You can’t give up, kid. Your dream means something! And I can help you.”
Sam stopped. Looked back at him. The wind bit her wet cheeks and the cold stung her eyes. “How can you help me when I can’t even help myself? Sometimes you just have to let go. This is me. Letting go.”
“So that’s it then? You’re going to settle, working as a typist for a tiny women’s magazine when you’re destined for so much more?”
She scoffed at that word: destined. “I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out. Goodbye, Raul.”
It was their second goodbye, and this time Sam meant it. She walked away thinking little of Raul, an arrogant, clueless man with the privilege to dream risk-free. What could Raul possibly know about her destiny?
Apparently he knew a lot.
The sit-in was plotted three and a half years later. Sam arrived at the Ladies Home Journal head office another six months after that. As of mere hours ago, Mr. Dreyfuss, the magazine’s editor, had just given women carte blanch to revolutionize a publication that reached millions of readers. And now here we were.
Raul had called and spoken to her mother. Presumably to offer a weak, belated apology for not showing up to report on the sit-in in New York City, but Sam would never know because she vowed then and there not to find out. There would be no return phone call, no reunion for Sam and Raul.
He had been given his chance to prove he cared four years ago at her father’s funeral, and he arrived too late. Then she handed him another chance yesterday to support her cause and he blew it again. With 373 miles—she knew the exact number as she had counted them down from the minute she left the NYPD police station to the minute she pulled up her driveway—of distance between them, it wasn’t like she would ever simply run into him. Goodbye, Raul. End of story.
Opening the locked back door—a testament to her overly cautious mother whose brain brimmed with worst-case scenarios—Sam placed her fingers between her lips and she blew out a shrill whistle. Across the next-door neighbor’s backyard Fido came trotting, his short legs frenzied and his tail and mane catching the breeze as the neighbor scowled from her porch.
“My God, your face!” Miss Posey shrieked, curlers pinned in neat rows across her pink scalp. At her slippered feet a mass of black curls yapped at Sam.
Sam absentmindedly covered her eye with her palm. “It’s just a bruise.”
“That’s why they invented concealer, dear.” Miss Posey turned her attention from Sam’s apparently freakish appearance to Fido. “Your nuisance animal escaped and pooped in my yard.”
“You’re welcome. Manure makes wonderful fertilizer.” Sam smiled warmly.
“I wasn’t thanking you.” Miss Posey scowled. “You know those things don’t belong in the suburbs, don’t you?”
“This thing is a Shetland pony, ma’am, and he belongs wherever he’ll be loved and taken care of,” Sam replied coolly.
“I can’t imagine the mess he’s made of your floors,” Miss Posey grumbled. Dangling from the back porch awning were tin cans on one end and milk jugs on the other, both of which mystified Sam. “And you’re bringing our property values down with that beast roaming around. It’s uncivilized, what you’re doing. Uncivilized!”
“I’ll have you know that Fido is quite intelligent, and more housebroken than your dog.”
Sam knew this to be fact upon hearing the countless reprimands coming from next-door about the poodle’s oopsie-poopsies in the living room. And kitchen. And at least once on the brand-new bedspread. That, and the constantly used pooper-scooper sitting at the ready on Miss Posey’s back porch that never seemed to be applied in the backyard.
“Archibald Maverick Emerson Posey the Sixth”—and yes, that was the dog’s actual name, as if Miss Posey had hand selected the most pretentious names she could think of—“is in training, I’ll have you know! But your mule is a disturbance to our peaceful community. A nuisance, that’s what he is. And dog food, that’s what he should be!” But Sam could barely hear Miss Posey’s reply over the poodle’s barking.
Then Miss Posey ruffled her housedress with a huff, turned on her slippered heel, and slammed the metal screen door shut behind her, catching a tuft of the dog’s bum fur in the door that made the pooch yelp.
Sam slipped into the solitude—and silence—of her kitchen, Fido following at her hip, his tiny hooves click-click-clicking after her. She kissed his outstretched muzzle and ran her fingers through his forelock, then dug through a pot of dirt beneath a grow light she had purchased from an off-the-grid marijuana farmer. Pulling a tassel of green leaves out, she washed off the carrot and offered a bite to Fido.
“Don’t listen to that grouch,” she assured him. “You’re a far-out pet. And much quieter too.”
Most days Sam appreciated the paid-off house in a stuffy community that she had inherited upon her grandmother’s passing. Other days she loathed it. Particularly the days when the beady, judgmental eyes of traditionalist widows and status-quo-following housewives eyed Sam and her eccentric ways with disdain.
Sometimes she even felt the displeasure of her grandmother seeping from the very walls that Sam had been forbidden from redecorating—as per stated in the will. Apparently Grandma Stanton wanted her style to live as long as her legacy… which was as nonexistent as the abstract expressionist wall art that Sam had taken down on moving day and now collected dust in the garage.
Grandma Stanton’s outdated tastes were woven into every detail. Built twenty years ago by Grandpa Stanton as an anniversary gift to his wife and a retirement gift to himself, within a year of moving in, the steelworker life—like father, like son—had caught up with him when he was diagnosed with lung cancer and his clinician blamed the working conditions. Though, Sam suspected the pack a day of Marlboros to be another contributor, despite the flood of ads endorsed by Mickey Mantle—“they’re mild and swell tasting!”—and Jackie Robinson claiming “the filters made them finer!” If tobacco helped Hank Aaron achieve his .355 batting average, what harm could it possibly cause Grandpa Stanton, he reasoned.
Checking the time on the wall-hanging sunburst clock—the one decoration Sam kept of her grandmother’s that made sense—she figured she had enough time for a bus ride into the city. She couldn’t wait to give her boss at Women’s House Magazine the good news—which he would most certainly not find to be good—that she now officially had her own big-wig-approved advice column.
By nine thirty Sam stood at the foot of the Gulf Building, its pyramidal top reaching for the sky and lit up in a steady blue, which forecast cool, fair weather. At nine forty-five Sam walked into the open bullpen office that matched every other office on the floor. And at nine forty-six Sam gasped with surprise—and well-deserved indignation—at the sight of the person filling up her tiny corner of the room, sitting in her stiff chair, with his dirty shoes propped up on her clean desk.
“Did you miss me?” he asked.
Sam barely heard him over the fury boiling her blood.
It didn’t take more than a moment for her to reply, “Not in a million years.”
