Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 73699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 368(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 368(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
What? I said it was time to let it all go, not become a doormat.
The cabbie gives me an impatient look in the rearview mirror, and I realize my stalling time is over. With a grimace, I shove open the cab door and step onto a street I haven’t set foot on in a long, long time.
I look around, somehow completely unsurprised to see that the street I grew up on looks exactly the same. You often hear people say how New York City is always changing, and it’s true. Just not on the Upper East Side. Or at least not on Sixty-third Street.
I glance at the row of town houses as the cabbie drives away, and on a closer look, a few things have changed. The Steins’ door is dark blue instead of red. Mrs. Krause’s home has gotten a facelift, no doubt by its new owners, considering Mrs. Krause had been in her late eighties when I was a girl. Trees are taller, flowerpots refreshed, but the essence of the street is still exactly as I remember it.
Finally, I fix my gaze straight ahead, at the home I grew up in. My parents’ town house has changed …
Not at all.
There’s still the dark gray door. The perfectly kept steps. No flowerpots at this house. My mother finds them messy. The welcome mat is strictly practical. No cheeky puns or friendly sayings, just a place to wipe your feet before entering the pristine foyer.
Sounds fun, right?
And now you’re wondering what I’m doing here. I was told, after all, that if I walked out the door, I was not to come back.
Yeah, well, I’m sort of wondering what I’m doing here myself. One minute I was making strained small talk with my mother, and the next she was informing me she’d see me at five for Sunday dinner.
Note that I said informing. Not asking if I was available, or if I’d like to come over. It was simply there. A command. I haven’t had Sunday dinner with my family for the better part of two decades, but you’d have never guessed it from my mom’s casual insistence.
And, so … here I am. Preparing to enter the lion’s den.
I manage the steps just fine, but the front door gives me pause, and I realize just what sort of mind games ten years can play.
Do I knock? Or merely … enter?
The thought of knocking feels unthinkable. I’ve burst through this door hundreds of times. Thousands. But I’m not an eighth grader bounding home from school any longer. I’m a thirty-one-year-old woman.
And this is no longer my home.
If you walk out that door, Charlotte Spencer, don’t expect to walk back in again, now or ever again.
The prideful part of me wants to reverse court and prove to my mother that you reap what you sow. You tell your only daughter never to come back, maybe she won’t.
And yet the other part of me, the one that’s grown up, the one that’s determined to be a kinder, better person, suspects that my mom’s demand that I be here for dinner tonight wasn’t uttered out of bossiness or control-freak tendencies, but out of fear. If I had to guess, I’d say that my mom was terrified that if she didn’t make me come for dinner, I wouldn’t.
Of course, it still irks that she hasn’t learned me well enough to know that the tighter she tugs the reins, the more I pull back, and that had she merely invited me to dinner, I’d be inside playing nice instead of lurking stubbornly on the porch.
Grow up, Charlotte.
Strangely, it’s Colin’s voice I hear in my head. Not that I’ve heard him utter those precise words, but close enough.
And it’s him I’m determined to prove wrong when I open the door.
I’m a little surprised to find it unlocked. And the second I step inside, I’m surprised by the slap of emotion. I’d thought it would be like stepping into a stranger’s home, or at best, a little sliver of my past.
My reaction is much more visceral than that, and much warmer. This is my home. Or at least it feels like it. Everything, from the click of my heel against the dark wood floor, to the elaborate flower arrangement on the entryway table, to the smell, is familiar.
A nice familiar, I’m a little surprised to realize. The first door to the right was my dad’s office, and poking my head into the dark room, I see that has remained the same. Same dark wood desk, same faintly woodsy smell. The computer’s been upgraded—a newer model Mac, which surprises me. I’d have pegged my dad as a PC guy for life.
I back out of the room and head toward the parlor, and yes, they call it that. My parents are, oh, how do I put this …