The floor in her bedroom is made of wide wooden planks. The apartment is on the 8th floor of an imposing limestone building on the corner of Commonwealth Avenue, a stone’s throw from the Boston Public Garden. Pale-colored brick covers part of the faded facade—this is a building that whispers old money and summers on Nantucket and Harvard alumni. Inside, the lobby reminds her of an aging patrician matriarch: once beautiful and still formidable, but time-worn and washed out. The walls are mirrored and an ancient green carpet directs visitors around a massive oak table upon which sits a flower arrangement so large you can barely see the doorman in his navy blazer. He sits at a marble-topped desk, the polished brass buttons dotting his lapel a perfect complement to the brass trimming along the wainscoting. Wainscoting: this was one of many words she’d never spoken aloud, or knew of, before she moved into apartment 8F. Part of her education is living in the rarified sphere of wealth of the Carlton House (she didn’t know apartment buildings could have names that sounded like prep school dormitories); part of it is Hadley.
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“Okay but, I might not be able to keep up,” she says nervously. The road ahead is narrowing; a mile back it curved sharply near the town green where she can see scattered figures kicking a soccer ball in the gathering dusk, and began to slope gently up the hill. “Oh, so you’re already intimidated by my athleticism?” he teases, but the thing is that she is, yes, definitely. “Your legs are twice as long as mine!” she protests. This trail run will mark the first time that they’ve run together: a milestone which is particularly monumental to her.
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Hi, hey, a note: Thank you for your thoughts on my last post! Haven’t decided for or against the newsletter yet, so for now, we’ll just carry on with some occasional fiction here, and who knows what else, and we’ll see where life takes us…
She feels deflated—and tired of talking—when she walks into the coffee shop on Wednesday morning. The argument last night with her mother sticks to her, and she can’t shake the off-kilter feeling. She and her mother never fight; in their household, it’s her dad whose hot temper sparks the arguments. She and her siblings were always arguing with him in a comfortable, this-is-how-we-love sort of way: One minute they were shouting and slamming doors, and then by dinner time everyone was completely fine. Fights with her dad pass like a quick thunderstorm, the tension dissolving into nothingness, the chaos necessary to clear the air—just like weather.
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They pull over and park on the side of a dusty, dirt- and gravel-packed road alongside the river, where it curves lazily under a covered bridge and disappears away in the distance like a silver coil. Above them, one hot air balloon rises in the dusky late-evening sunshine, then two, then three. Within twenty minutes, the entire sky is filled with them. The one closest to them is a patchwork of canary yellow and bright red squares. She watches it rise, pausing to sneak a quick sideways glance at him—just as rapt— then turns back to witness the continued ascent. His hand, broad and calloused, brushes against hers and her heart seems to mirror the ballon: so light and full it might burst out of her chest.
Summer, she thinks. Summer is the best time with him.
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She’s been running early in the morning—before 7 AM—now that every day dawns with an oppressive blanket of humidity and heat. It’s as if the months of the summer were tentative until now, July feeling too timid to really open ‘er up, then August arrived and put its foot down, turning up the wattage and sizzling away the drizzly, cloudy weather, like a burner on high under a pan of liquid.
Even starting early doesn’t help on some days. It’s so hot that she wilts the second she steps outside to lace up her running shoes. She has no energy—and every step is like pulling her legs through something sticky and tar-like. But she does it anyway. She finishes, her shirt drenched in sweat. She slips into the cool water off the dock by the marina, hanging onto the ladder to check for jellyfish. She scans the horizon for the dot of a fin or a flicker of motion—two weeks ago her neighbors saw two dolphins flitting around the boats moored just offshore.
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