“I mean, how often do you get to just let loose and not worry about how it fits into your perfect little plan?” Libby goes on. “You deserve to have some low-pressure fun, and frankly, I deserve to live vicariously through you. Ergo, the dates.”
“So am I allowed to take the earpiece out after dinner, or . . .”
Libby throws up her hands. “You know what, fine, forget number five! Even though it would be good for you. Even though I basically designed this whole trip for you to have your small-town romance novel experience, I guess—”
“Okay, okay!” I cry. “I’ll do the lumberjack dates, but they’d better look like Robert Redford.”
She squeals excitedly. “Young or old?”
I stare at her.
“Right,” she says. “Got it. So, moving on. Number six: Go skinny-dipping in a natural body of water.”
“What if there are bacteria that affect the baby or something?” I ask.
“Damn it,” she grumbles, frowning. “I really didn’t think all of this through as well as I thought.”
“Nonsense,” I say. “It’s an amazing list.”
“You’ll just have to go skinny-dipping without me,” she says, distracted.
“A lone thirty-two-year-old woman, naked in the local swimming hole. Sounds like a good way to get arrested.”
“Seven,” she reads. “Sleep under the stars. Eight: Attend a town function — i.e. local wedding or festival of some kind.”
I find a Sharpie in my bag and add funeral, bris, ladies’ night at the local roller rink.
“Trying to meet a hot ER doctor, are we?” Libby says, and I scratch out the part about the roller rink. Then I notice number nine.
Ride a horse.
“Again.” I wave vaguely toward Libby’s stomach. I cross out ride and change it to pet, and she gives a resigned sigh.
Start a fire (controlled)
Hike???? (Worth it???)
When she was sixteen, Libby had announced she’d be following her boyfriend out to work at Yellowstone for the summer, and Mom and I had howled with laughter. If there was one thing all Stephens girls had in common — aside from our love of books, vitamin-C serums, and pretty clothes — it was our avoidance of the great outdoors. The closest we ever came to hiking was a brisk walk in Central Park’s Ramble, and even then, there were usually paper bowls filled with food truck waffles and ice cream involved. Not exactly roughing it.
Needless to say, Libby dumped that guy two weeks before she was supposed to leave.
I tap the final line on the list: Save a local business. “You do realize we’re only here for a month.” Three weeks of just the two of us, and then Brendan and the girls will join. We’ve gotten a steep discount by staying so long, though how I’ll make it past week one, I have no idea.
The last time I traveled, I went home after two days. Even letting my mind wander toward that trip with Jakob is a mistake. I jerk my focus back to the present. This won’t be like that. I won’t let it. I can do this, for Libby.
“They always save a local business in small-town romances,” she’s saying. “We literally have no choice. I’m hoping for a down-on-its-luck goat farm.”
“Ooh,” I say. “Maybe we can get the ritualistic sacrifice community to band together in dramatic fashion to save the goats. For now, I mean. Eventually, they’ll have to die on the altar.”
“Well, of course.” Libby takes a swig of tomato juice. “That’s the biz, baby.”
Our taxi driver looks like Santa Claus, down to the red T-shirt and the suspenders holding his faded jeans up. But he drives like the cigar-smoking cabbie from Bill Murray’s Scrooged.
Little squeaks keep sneaking out of Libby when he takes a corner too fast, and at one point, I catch her whispering promises of safety to her belly.
“Sunshine Falls, eh?” the driver asks. He has to shout, because he’s made the unilateral decision to roll all four windows down. My hair is flapping so violently across my face I can barely see his watery eyes in the rearview mirror when I look up from my phone.
In the time that we were deplaning and collecting our luggage — a full hour, despite the fact that our flight was the only arrival in the dinky airport — the number of messages in my inbox has doubled. It looks like I just got back from an eight-week stranding on a desert island.
Nothing makes a coterie of already neurotic authors quite so neurotic as publishing’s annual slow season. Every delayed reply they get seems to trigger an avalanche of DOES MY EDITOR HATE ME?????? DO YOU HATE ME?? DOES EVERYONE HATE ME???
“Yep!” I shout back to our driver. Libby has her head between her knees now.
“You must have family in town,” he screams over the wind.
Maybe it’s the New Yorker in me, or maybe it’s the woman, but I’m not about to announce that we don’t know anyone here, so I just say, “What makes you say that?”
“Why else would you come here?” He laughs, whipping around a corner.
When we slow to a stop a few minutes later, it’s all I can do to keep from bursting into applause like someone whose plane just made an emergency landing.
Libby sits up woozily, smoothing her gleaming (miraculously untangled) hair.
“Where . . . where are we?” I ask, looking around.
There’s nothing but shaggy, sun-blanched grass on either side of the narrow dirt road. Ahead, it ends abruptly, and a meadow slopes upward, riddled with sprays of yellow and purple wildflowers. A dead end.
Which begs the question: are we about to be murdered?
The driver ducks his head to peer up the slope. “Goode’s Lily Cottage, just over that hill.”
Libby and I duck our heads too, trying to get a better look. Halfway up the hill, a staircase appears out of nowhere. Maybe staircase is too generous a word. Wooden slats cut a path into the grassy hillside, like a series of small retaining walls.
Libby grimaces. “The listing did note it wasn’t wheelchair accessible.”
“Did it also mention we’d need a ski lift?”
Santa has already gotten out of the car to wrestle our luggage from the trunk. I clamber out after him into the brilliant sunlight, the heat instantly making my all-black travel uniform feel stiflingly thick. Where the dirt road ends, there’s a black mailbox, Goode’s Lily Cottage painted in curly white on it.
“There isn’t another way?” I ask. “A road that goes all the way up? My sister’s . . .”
I swear Libby sucks in, trying to look as un-pregnant as possible. “I’m fine,” she insists.
I briefly consider waving toward my four-inch suede heels next, but I don’t want to give the universe the satisfaction of leaning into the cliché.
“ ’Fraid I can’t get you any closer,” he replies as he climbs back into the car. “An acre or two back is Sally’s place. That’s the second-closest road, but still a good ways further.” He holds his business card out the window. “If you need another ride, use this number.”
Libby accepts the scrap of paper, and over her shoulder, I read: Hardy Weatherbee, Taxi Services and Unofficial Once in a Lifetime Tours. Her bark of laughter is lost beneath the roar of Hardy Weatherbee’s car reversing down the road like a bat out of hell.