It's You Read Online Free PDF Page A

dinner.”
    “Sounds good.”
    • • •
    T hirty minutes later I’ve got my bags. I’m the only one tonight in the back of the big passenger van. The driver is quiet, and I check my phone for messages—there are none. My life for the last year has been work and work. It’ll be good to use these next few weeks in Napa to relax and rest and figure out how to be a little more social again.
    I did enjoy talking to Diana on the plane. Chatting with her made the flight pass quickly, and I liked her. She was fun. Effervescent. I’d forgotten what positive girl energy feels like.
    Need more of that. Didn’t really have that in dental school, either. There was so much pressure. That first year, especially . . .
    But I don’t want to think about dental school. Don’t want to think about Dr. Morris. Don’t want to think about anything at all.
    Staring out the van window, I gaze up into the sky. The young moon is three quarters full. Waxing gibbous.
    I only know this because Andrew loved the moon. He loved the stars and the night sky and owned a telescope from an early age. In the desert you can see the stars better than you can in a city. The sky is bigger, and the stars are brighter. Andrew loved the sky. He, my independent Aquarius, wanted to make the world a better place. He was full of ideas and change. He had such a good heart, and even better intentions.
    I don’t understand how he could just go . . . just . . .
leave
.
    I don’t—
    I rub my eyes with my fist. Can’t do this now. Not sure I should do this anytime. Can’t keep going to these places in my head and heart. But I don’t know where to go if I don’t go there. Don’t want to lose him. Don’t want to forget him. So afraid that if I let go too much he’ll disappear completely.
    And yet he was too good to be forgotten.
    Too kind to become nothing.
    There must be another way to love. To remember love.
    I’m in the hills of Sonoma County now, hills rolling, rising, moonlight whispering to me in slivers and sighs.
    I know why Mom and Dad wanted to retire here. It’s beautiful. But it’s too quiet for me tonight. I need a city. I need urgency and energy.
    Or at the very least, I need something to do.
    • • •
    E ven though no one lives in the 1910 farmhouse on Poppy Lane, the house isn’t dark when the shuttle pulls up.
    It’s almost one thirty but the front porch light is on and two more glow inside, soft yellow lining the edges of the living room curtains. The lights are on timers and every week the housekeeper, who sweeps the front porch and collects the free local community newspaper that lands in the driveway Wednesday afternoons, adjusts the timer so that different lamps turn on and off.
    I pay the driver and shoulder my bags and head for the house. It takes me a moment to locate the key and get the alarm off, and then I enter the house, say good night to the moon, and Andrew. I like to think of him happy, there in the sky and stars, and once inside the house I say hello to my mom. I wait to feel her presence but she’s not here. This house never had time to truly become her home, and my footsteps echo on the hardwood floors, the interior hollow and empty.
    I walk around, turning on and off lights, chasing away the shadows that linger in a house devoid of people. I take in the furniture that is still new and unlived in, furniture bought for the home that was supposed to be a dream house and never came to anything. I open the refrigerator. It’s cold and empty, save for an open box of baking soda on the top shelf.
    Dad should sell the house. And Mom’s car. He should move down to Scottsdale with me and we should become a family again.
    I pass through the house a second time, now turning out lights, ending in the master bedroom with the new king bed and new big highboy dresser. The old set with the full bed had been demoted to the guest room, but when Mom died and Dad went to Napa Estates, he took the old master bedroom set with him. It was