fic: a timeline is an arrow (original)
a timeline is an arrow
original. time marches forward and you can’t leap back. a ten year reunion on new year’s eve. rated pg. 2767 words.
notes: for inrevelations's fourth challenge, and for tealighttrees. the prompt was pretty open and I chose to go the New Year's Eve route, so i hope you enjoy this.
through the years we all will be together
if the fates allow
(have yourself a merry little christmas)
“I don’t want to see you again,” she said when she was twenty-two. He was twenty-three, he was drunk, he was in love.
“I don’t want to see you again,” she said, and the thing is, she never did.
-
When Greer hears the news she is shopping for a new cheese grater at a Crate and Barrel across the street from the university where Ralph teaches.
Her cell phone rings, and she places the selected cheese grater down on a kitchen table decorated with red and green placemats, a holdover from the holiday season.
Greer had loved Robert first. She had hated him first as well, but that does not stop her from sinking into one of the four chairs at the kitchen table and burying her head in her hands as she listens to the voice on the other end.
“What’s going to happen next?” she breathes into the phone. The phone does not answer back and a stranger with her arms full of throw pillows bumps the back of Greer’s chair, jarring her forward against the table.
“What do we do?” she asks, and again, there is no answer.
“Warren?” she says.
“Robert’s dead,” he repeats, and this time she does not answer.
-
Ten years ago, at Yale, it had been the three of them: Robert and Greer and Warren. Warren knew Robert first, was his roommate freshman year, and Greer had loved Robert first.
A lot can change from the beginning, a lot can change over the course and twist of time. Warren knew Robert first and Warren knew Robert last. Greer loved Robert first.
She loved Warren last.
-
“Will you come?” Warren asks her. “Auld Lang Syne” begins to fill the store and Greer presses a hand to her mouth. She nods, knows Warren cannot see it.
-
Over the course of ten years, ten years since graduation, they had come to interact only three times. Greer took to the world and traveled, made an international name for herself as a photographer. Warren, after his own initial stumbles following graduation, worked his way quietly up the corporate ladder at one of the big TV networks in New York.
Their first interaction occurred as follows:
His network had planned to air a special about the fascinating people of the year. The entire office was sure Greer was one of them.
There was a bulletin board with photographs of potential subjects and guests tacked to it. Greer’s face was tan in the picture and her hair was pulled up off her face. Thin little lines Warren could not remember her ever having framed the corners of her eyes and mouth. She had her camera and a bright red scarf around her neck and Warren had been sure that when the picture had been taken she was laughing.
There were notecards beneath each picture delineating just why each candidate was fascinating enough for eight minutes of television.
Greer’s card read: PULITZER, in all capital letters. THE FARC. SUDAN. GAZA. MUMBAI. BAGHDAD. KABUL. It was like a geographical listing of the world’s greatest humanitarian nightmares. ROMANIA. BEIJING. CAR BOMB JERUSALEM. VENZUELA - ARRESTED.
“I love it,” they all kept saying, pointing to Greer’s face.
Warren kept silent and sipped his coffee. They discussed how best to get in contact with the intrepid photojournalist - the tagline the suits wanted to tack to her. Rule number one Warren had learned: every person is just waiting to be branded.
Greer would hate this.
“I went to college with her,” Warren surprised himself by saying.
“I’ll see if I can get in touch,” he said.
Greer had been easier to track down than Warren had expected. There were the embassies, the humanitarian organizations, various international affiliates, and suddenly there she was - in Syria.
Her cell phone number was just as easy to track down.
She answered on the fourth ring when he called.
“This is Greer,” she said and Warren had stared at the bulletin board.
“Hi Greer,” and his voice was smug, full of something he couldn’t name but thinks it was supposed to be something like fondness.
“Who is this?” He had wanted to laugh. He didn’t.
“It’s Warren,” he said.
-
It is a photograph of a pick-up truck. The windows have been blown out and remaining pieces of broken glass yawn up from the window frame. Bullet holes riddle the sides, the front end of it, and the bed of the pick-up is marked by raw scorch marks - a dramatic leap from the dirty white paint of the truck to the black smoky burn.
There are two small children who play with sticks in front of the truck.
The sky in the background is a cloudless blue, no wind to kick up the dust. The children play and frozen in time are twin grins, so bright and so wide they threaten to overwhelm their small faces. The jungle beckons in green behind the dusty trail, the destroyed truck, and the children play.
This is the photograph that earned Greer Dale her Pulitzer.
-
Warren picks Greer up from the airport. This is his town, he lives here, and her flight from Boston touches down that evening.
“Let me get a look at you,” she says with a crooked smile. The smile hasn’t changed. The rest of her has. She’s smaller than he remembers, thinner, more drawn around the face, the eyes in particular, and her clothes, all the layers she is wearing, scarves, a sweater, another sweater under that, hang off her frame.
“Could say the same for you,” he says, and when he smiles he does not show his teeth. He imagines he looks different as well. That’s to be expected. He’s older, he’s leaner, the more you know, the more it shows. He thinks his mother used to say that.
“I think this is supposed to be the part where you ask me if I ever think about you,” she says as the alarm sounds and the baggage carousel begins to turn.
“Fine. Do you ever think of me?” Her smile this time is winning and cruel.
“No.”
-
The second time he saw her, they were at the White House. There was a reception. He cornered her outside. She stood there without a coat and an unlit cigarette. He didn’t offer to light it for her but shared his champagne.
“The Pulitzer was an accident,” she drawled, drunk. “Right place, right time. And I just so happened to have a camera.”
“I saw you talking to Barbara Walters.”
Greer laughed. “Smug bitch.”
Greer cleared her throat. “You know,” she said. “I was thinking about, well. I don’t really know what I was thinking about. Just, like. I’ve realized that I tell a lot of lies. It’s like sometimes I think I lie for no other reason than that I can.”
“You think this is news for me?” Warren asked, colder than he meant to. Greer waved her hand.
“Not like that,” she said. “It’s like, I’ll say ‘I’m going to the grocery store,’ but I’ll head straight to a coffee shop instead, which was always my intended destination, and after I leave the coffee shop I’ll go to the grocery store and buy a bottle of juice or, I don’t know, something frozen, dinner, and I’ll head back and call it proof.” She takes a sip from his champagne glass.
“What I don’t get,” she continued, “is why I feel that is so imperative that I lie about the coffee shop. But it is.”
“You lie to Ralph,” Warren said.
“Don’t,” Greer said. “Don’t.”
-
The funeral is small, quiet. Robert’s mother sobs when she sees both Warren and Greer together and draws them into a hug at the same time. Greer grabs onto his elbow as they stand alongside the grave and does not let go until they reach his car.
There is a wake at Robert’s mother’s apartment. They sit outside, parallel parked on the street, but Warren does not turn off the ignition. They sit in silence for five minutes.
“You ever hear the one about the monkey who got his tail stuck in a revolving door?”she asks finally. From the seat next to her, Warren’s fingers still against the steering wheel and he grunts. She thinks that means to continue.
“Yeah,” she says and her warm breath fogs up the cold car window. “He said, ‘it won’t be long now.’”
Warren doesn’t laugh but he lets out a heavy breath of air that could have been the start of a chuckle if he let it.
“Are we going to go in?” she asks. “Or are going to sit here, listening to talk radio, wasting gas, and I’ll crack jokes and you’ll just…sit there, doing whatever it is you do.”
“We’re going to go in,” he says on what sounds like another sigh, and maybe that has happened, maybe they have become those tired people that can’t move from the front seats of cars to climb stairs up to apartments full of old, sad friends they never knew.
“Are we going to do it now?” Greer prods. Warren flicks the key in the ignition and the car goes silent, the motor still, and the radio cuts off in the middle of a commercial for a new nightclub.
-
The third time, it was a month before she was to be married and she called him.
“Who plans a winter wedding?” she asked. She could hear hard music in the background on his end but she didn’t ask him where he was. He didn’t offer the information either, but he listened, offered grunts of assent and dissent alike. She was drunk. She held the bottle of champagne by the neck, no longer cold in her fist.
Greer met Ralph in Senegal.
That was a long time ago, she thinks.
Ralph had been a part of the Peace Corps then, six months left, and Greer had been there to take pictures.
He was nothing like the men she had known back home. For some reason that alone meant everything.
-
They leave the wake early. It’s New Year’s Eve. They stop at the first diner they see and when they walk in, a bell over the door rings. They both order coffee. They sit in a red booth across from one another and Warren starts talking.
He tells her his brother is in jail for the same shit Warren himself used to pull.
“That was a long time ago,” Warren will say if she reminds him of this.
“You were always smarter than him,” Greer says and takes a small sip of her coffee. “I don’t think anyone ever gave you enough credit for that.”
“Thanks,” he drawls, twists the placemat with his fingers, runs his knuckles over the formica of the table.
“What’s your official job title anyway? I don’t think they make business cards that say, ‘Criminal’ in Times New Roman.”
He snorts. “Always too clever by half,” he grumbles, but there’s some humor in it. He runs a hand over his mouth. He is nervous. This is stupid. “I’m a network executive these days. You know that.”
“I know,” she nods. “Figured you could do with a little Jacob Marley, blast from the past, chains rattling and all.”
“God bless us every one,” Warren mumbles. From behind him, from behind the counter, a small television infested with static shows Times Square, a fifteen minute walk from here. In the small diner the fluorescent lights do neither of them any favors. Her face looks hollowed, almost blue, and he imagines his does as well.
It’s ten o’clock.
-
It is curious how the mind never elects to remember the bad. At least not at the forefront. It takes a bit of effort on one’s part to recognize all the misery and all the boredom and all the listless self-pity of the past.
Instead, it’s a lot easier to look back and see a filmstrip of glowing moments, moments where the idea of any happiness less than this seems an ugly impossibility. We all do it.
We all forget. That’s the point here. We all forget.
-
On December 31, 1999, the following exchange occurred:
“You put on a condom right?” she said.
He laughed; it came out as less of a laugh and more like a push of air against her ear. “Yeah,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “I don’t want to have any of your children.”
He laughed again, the sound more defined this time.
“I don’t want you to either.”
Warren loved her then.
-
They ring in the new year in the valet drive of her hotel in Manhattan. They sit in the car again and they listen on the radio to cheers and shouts and once again the opening peals of “Auld Lang Syne.”
She kisses him on the cheek before she goes.
He drops her at the airport the next day. He spends the night alone in his apartment and she spends hers in a hotel. His eyes watch the ring on her finger but he does not ask about Ralph, he does not mention him. She doesn’t either.
It is the first of January, and JFK is crowded. Strangers bump against the two of them as they stand near the American Airlines counter.
“I’ll call you and…” she starts and then trails off. Warren smiles, closed mouth and lines at his eyes.
“I’m sure you will,” he says and she smiles too, because she knows they don’t call. She knows they don’t do that.
“I should,” she says and nods, looks at the line and the tangle of people and their luggage.
This is when he kisses her. This is when Warren kisses Greer for the first time in ten years. Her lips are cold but her mouth is hot and it is everything and nothing what he remembers of her. She is still small against him and she is still just as eager as his memory always tells him she is, but it’s not the same. In a crowded airport, Warren suddenly feels tired and helpless. Robert is dead, it’s another new year, and the girl that he holds is no longer a girl.
He is the first to pull away and for a moment she is bright, young Greer again. The Greer that used to chain smoke on the front porch of the house Warren and Robert shared with six other guys, the Greer that made martinis out of cheap vodka and whatever else she could find in the kitchen. She is the Greer that told him in confidence at the age of twenty-one that she always loved him best. She’s the Greer that broke Robert’s heart.
“Best be going, right?” he tells her. She swallows and she nods. She joins the crowd and just once she turns around. She waves at him over her shoulder and he waves back.
-
Warren loved Greer first and last.
Warren loved Greer always.
-
“We don’t come back from here,” the guide told her in Colombia. There was too much sweat itching down the back of Greer’s shirt and there were too many bugs, mosquitoes, and the entire time she regretted it. She regretted everything. She shouldn’t have come, she wasn’t supposed to be here. She shouldn’t have left Robert and she shouldn’t hate Warren. She shouldn’t have done a lot of things and there are a lot of things still she should be doing, but here she is, jungle undergrowth and green and blue and green and blue and brown everywhere and under her.
There is a road and there is a clearing. A large pick-up truck sits still.
Greer takes out her camera.
-
Greer loved Robert when she was eighteen. She thinks he loved her then too, knows he loved her later, closer to graduation.
She knows she did not love him then.
On December 26, the day after Christmas, Robert drove back from his childhood house to the city. He was halfway there; he was running low on gas. He had reached the halfway point, that spot on the map that would be equidistance from a place he once called home and the alternate location that had stolen this title.
He opened the door to the convenience store and a small bell overhead rang.
-
fin.
original. time marches forward and you can’t leap back. a ten year reunion on new year’s eve. rated pg. 2767 words.
notes: for inrevelations's fourth challenge, and for tealighttrees. the prompt was pretty open and I chose to go the New Year's Eve route, so i hope you enjoy this.
through the years we all will be together
if the fates allow
(have yourself a merry little christmas)
“I don’t want to see you again,” she said when she was twenty-two. He was twenty-three, he was drunk, he was in love.
“I don’t want to see you again,” she said, and the thing is, she never did.
-
When Greer hears the news she is shopping for a new cheese grater at a Crate and Barrel across the street from the university where Ralph teaches.
Her cell phone rings, and she places the selected cheese grater down on a kitchen table decorated with red and green placemats, a holdover from the holiday season.
Greer had loved Robert first. She had hated him first as well, but that does not stop her from sinking into one of the four chairs at the kitchen table and burying her head in her hands as she listens to the voice on the other end.
“What’s going to happen next?” she breathes into the phone. The phone does not answer back and a stranger with her arms full of throw pillows bumps the back of Greer’s chair, jarring her forward against the table.
“What do we do?” she asks, and again, there is no answer.
“Warren?” she says.
“Robert’s dead,” he repeats, and this time she does not answer.
-
Ten years ago, at Yale, it had been the three of them: Robert and Greer and Warren. Warren knew Robert first, was his roommate freshman year, and Greer had loved Robert first.
A lot can change from the beginning, a lot can change over the course and twist of time. Warren knew Robert first and Warren knew Robert last. Greer loved Robert first.
She loved Warren last.
-
“Will you come?” Warren asks her. “Auld Lang Syne” begins to fill the store and Greer presses a hand to her mouth. She nods, knows Warren cannot see it.
-
Over the course of ten years, ten years since graduation, they had come to interact only three times. Greer took to the world and traveled, made an international name for herself as a photographer. Warren, after his own initial stumbles following graduation, worked his way quietly up the corporate ladder at one of the big TV networks in New York.
Their first interaction occurred as follows:
His network had planned to air a special about the fascinating people of the year. The entire office was sure Greer was one of them.
There was a bulletin board with photographs of potential subjects and guests tacked to it. Greer’s face was tan in the picture and her hair was pulled up off her face. Thin little lines Warren could not remember her ever having framed the corners of her eyes and mouth. She had her camera and a bright red scarf around her neck and Warren had been sure that when the picture had been taken she was laughing.
There were notecards beneath each picture delineating just why each candidate was fascinating enough for eight minutes of television.
Greer’s card read: PULITZER, in all capital letters. THE FARC. SUDAN. GAZA. MUMBAI. BAGHDAD. KABUL. It was like a geographical listing of the world’s greatest humanitarian nightmares. ROMANIA. BEIJING. CAR BOMB JERUSALEM. VENZUELA - ARRESTED.
“I love it,” they all kept saying, pointing to Greer’s face.
Warren kept silent and sipped his coffee. They discussed how best to get in contact with the intrepid photojournalist - the tagline the suits wanted to tack to her. Rule number one Warren had learned: every person is just waiting to be branded.
Greer would hate this.
“I went to college with her,” Warren surprised himself by saying.
“I’ll see if I can get in touch,” he said.
Greer had been easier to track down than Warren had expected. There were the embassies, the humanitarian organizations, various international affiliates, and suddenly there she was - in Syria.
Her cell phone number was just as easy to track down.
She answered on the fourth ring when he called.
“This is Greer,” she said and Warren had stared at the bulletin board.
“Hi Greer,” and his voice was smug, full of something he couldn’t name but thinks it was supposed to be something like fondness.
“Who is this?” He had wanted to laugh. He didn’t.
“It’s Warren,” he said.
-
It is a photograph of a pick-up truck. The windows have been blown out and remaining pieces of broken glass yawn up from the window frame. Bullet holes riddle the sides, the front end of it, and the bed of the pick-up is marked by raw scorch marks - a dramatic leap from the dirty white paint of the truck to the black smoky burn.
There are two small children who play with sticks in front of the truck.
The sky in the background is a cloudless blue, no wind to kick up the dust. The children play and frozen in time are twin grins, so bright and so wide they threaten to overwhelm their small faces. The jungle beckons in green behind the dusty trail, the destroyed truck, and the children play.
This is the photograph that earned Greer Dale her Pulitzer.
-
Warren picks Greer up from the airport. This is his town, he lives here, and her flight from Boston touches down that evening.
“Let me get a look at you,” she says with a crooked smile. The smile hasn’t changed. The rest of her has. She’s smaller than he remembers, thinner, more drawn around the face, the eyes in particular, and her clothes, all the layers she is wearing, scarves, a sweater, another sweater under that, hang off her frame.
“Could say the same for you,” he says, and when he smiles he does not show his teeth. He imagines he looks different as well. That’s to be expected. He’s older, he’s leaner, the more you know, the more it shows. He thinks his mother used to say that.
“I think this is supposed to be the part where you ask me if I ever think about you,” she says as the alarm sounds and the baggage carousel begins to turn.
“Fine. Do you ever think of me?” Her smile this time is winning and cruel.
“No.”
-
The second time he saw her, they were at the White House. There was a reception. He cornered her outside. She stood there without a coat and an unlit cigarette. He didn’t offer to light it for her but shared his champagne.
“The Pulitzer was an accident,” she drawled, drunk. “Right place, right time. And I just so happened to have a camera.”
“I saw you talking to Barbara Walters.”
Greer laughed. “Smug bitch.”
Greer cleared her throat. “You know,” she said. “I was thinking about, well. I don’t really know what I was thinking about. Just, like. I’ve realized that I tell a lot of lies. It’s like sometimes I think I lie for no other reason than that I can.”
“You think this is news for me?” Warren asked, colder than he meant to. Greer waved her hand.
“Not like that,” she said. “It’s like, I’ll say ‘I’m going to the grocery store,’ but I’ll head straight to a coffee shop instead, which was always my intended destination, and after I leave the coffee shop I’ll go to the grocery store and buy a bottle of juice or, I don’t know, something frozen, dinner, and I’ll head back and call it proof.” She takes a sip from his champagne glass.
“What I don’t get,” she continued, “is why I feel that is so imperative that I lie about the coffee shop. But it is.”
“You lie to Ralph,” Warren said.
“Don’t,” Greer said. “Don’t.”
-
The funeral is small, quiet. Robert’s mother sobs when she sees both Warren and Greer together and draws them into a hug at the same time. Greer grabs onto his elbow as they stand alongside the grave and does not let go until they reach his car.
There is a wake at Robert’s mother’s apartment. They sit outside, parallel parked on the street, but Warren does not turn off the ignition. They sit in silence for five minutes.
“You ever hear the one about the monkey who got his tail stuck in a revolving door?”she asks finally. From the seat next to her, Warren’s fingers still against the steering wheel and he grunts. She thinks that means to continue.
“Yeah,” she says and her warm breath fogs up the cold car window. “He said, ‘it won’t be long now.’”
Warren doesn’t laugh but he lets out a heavy breath of air that could have been the start of a chuckle if he let it.
“Are we going to go in?” she asks. “Or are going to sit here, listening to talk radio, wasting gas, and I’ll crack jokes and you’ll just…sit there, doing whatever it is you do.”
“We’re going to go in,” he says on what sounds like another sigh, and maybe that has happened, maybe they have become those tired people that can’t move from the front seats of cars to climb stairs up to apartments full of old, sad friends they never knew.
“Are we going to do it now?” Greer prods. Warren flicks the key in the ignition and the car goes silent, the motor still, and the radio cuts off in the middle of a commercial for a new nightclub.
-
The third time, it was a month before she was to be married and she called him.
“Who plans a winter wedding?” she asked. She could hear hard music in the background on his end but she didn’t ask him where he was. He didn’t offer the information either, but he listened, offered grunts of assent and dissent alike. She was drunk. She held the bottle of champagne by the neck, no longer cold in her fist.
Greer met Ralph in Senegal.
That was a long time ago, she thinks.
Ralph had been a part of the Peace Corps then, six months left, and Greer had been there to take pictures.
He was nothing like the men she had known back home. For some reason that alone meant everything.
-
They leave the wake early. It’s New Year’s Eve. They stop at the first diner they see and when they walk in, a bell over the door rings. They both order coffee. They sit in a red booth across from one another and Warren starts talking.
He tells her his brother is in jail for the same shit Warren himself used to pull.
“That was a long time ago,” Warren will say if she reminds him of this.
“You were always smarter than him,” Greer says and takes a small sip of her coffee. “I don’t think anyone ever gave you enough credit for that.”
“Thanks,” he drawls, twists the placemat with his fingers, runs his knuckles over the formica of the table.
“What’s your official job title anyway? I don’t think they make business cards that say, ‘Criminal’ in Times New Roman.”
He snorts. “Always too clever by half,” he grumbles, but there’s some humor in it. He runs a hand over his mouth. He is nervous. This is stupid. “I’m a network executive these days. You know that.”
“I know,” she nods. “Figured you could do with a little Jacob Marley, blast from the past, chains rattling and all.”
“God bless us every one,” Warren mumbles. From behind him, from behind the counter, a small television infested with static shows Times Square, a fifteen minute walk from here. In the small diner the fluorescent lights do neither of them any favors. Her face looks hollowed, almost blue, and he imagines his does as well.
It’s ten o’clock.
-
It is curious how the mind never elects to remember the bad. At least not at the forefront. It takes a bit of effort on one’s part to recognize all the misery and all the boredom and all the listless self-pity of the past.
Instead, it’s a lot easier to look back and see a filmstrip of glowing moments, moments where the idea of any happiness less than this seems an ugly impossibility. We all do it.
We all forget. That’s the point here. We all forget.
-
On December 31, 1999, the following exchange occurred:
“You put on a condom right?” she said.
He laughed; it came out as less of a laugh and more like a push of air against her ear. “Yeah,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “I don’t want to have any of your children.”
He laughed again, the sound more defined this time.
“I don’t want you to either.”
Warren loved her then.
-
They ring in the new year in the valet drive of her hotel in Manhattan. They sit in the car again and they listen on the radio to cheers and shouts and once again the opening peals of “Auld Lang Syne.”
She kisses him on the cheek before she goes.
He drops her at the airport the next day. He spends the night alone in his apartment and she spends hers in a hotel. His eyes watch the ring on her finger but he does not ask about Ralph, he does not mention him. She doesn’t either.
It is the first of January, and JFK is crowded. Strangers bump against the two of them as they stand near the American Airlines counter.
“I’ll call you and…” she starts and then trails off. Warren smiles, closed mouth and lines at his eyes.
“I’m sure you will,” he says and she smiles too, because she knows they don’t call. She knows they don’t do that.
“I should,” she says and nods, looks at the line and the tangle of people and their luggage.
This is when he kisses her. This is when Warren kisses Greer for the first time in ten years. Her lips are cold but her mouth is hot and it is everything and nothing what he remembers of her. She is still small against him and she is still just as eager as his memory always tells him she is, but it’s not the same. In a crowded airport, Warren suddenly feels tired and helpless. Robert is dead, it’s another new year, and the girl that he holds is no longer a girl.
He is the first to pull away and for a moment she is bright, young Greer again. The Greer that used to chain smoke on the front porch of the house Warren and Robert shared with six other guys, the Greer that made martinis out of cheap vodka and whatever else she could find in the kitchen. She is the Greer that told him in confidence at the age of twenty-one that she always loved him best. She’s the Greer that broke Robert’s heart.
“Best be going, right?” he tells her. She swallows and she nods. She joins the crowd and just once she turns around. She waves at him over her shoulder and he waves back.
-
Warren loved Greer first and last.
Warren loved Greer always.
-
“We don’t come back from here,” the guide told her in Colombia. There was too much sweat itching down the back of Greer’s shirt and there were too many bugs, mosquitoes, and the entire time she regretted it. She regretted everything. She shouldn’t have come, she wasn’t supposed to be here. She shouldn’t have left Robert and she shouldn’t hate Warren. She shouldn’t have done a lot of things and there are a lot of things still she should be doing, but here she is, jungle undergrowth and green and blue and green and blue and brown everywhere and under her.
There is a road and there is a clearing. A large pick-up truck sits still.
Greer takes out her camera.
-
Greer loved Robert when she was eighteen. She thinks he loved her then too, knows he loved her later, closer to graduation.
She knows she did not love him then.
On December 26, the day after Christmas, Robert drove back from his childhood house to the city. He was halfway there; he was running low on gas. He had reached the halfway point, that spot on the map that would be equidistance from a place he once called home and the alternate location that had stolen this title.
He opened the door to the convenience store and a small bell overhead rang.
-
fin.