London Is the Best City in America Read Online Free PDF Page B

doesn’t matter what I want, Josh,” I said.
    He didn’t say anything.
    “I’m just trying to understand what’s going on with you.”
    “Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll go ahead and put that on my list of things to figure out, okay?”
    Then he gave me a small, sad smile and started walking again toward the dim light of our front porch.

It seems important to mention that this was only the third time I had been to my parents’ home since moving to Narragansett—and both of the previous visits had lasted for less than twelve hours. No sleepovers, no late-night talks that would end with me explaining again why I refused to leave my small fishing town. They couldn’t hear me. Just like I couldn’t hear them when they’d plead their case to move back to New York, to reapply to film school, to reapply to a different school, to get my life back on track. On track was a very big thing for them—almost as big as leaving Rhode Island in the first place.
    And leaving Rhode Island in the first place was something I certainly wasn’t intending to do anytime soon. I felt too safe there. No one expected anything of me, no one expected me to take any chances. Which was a good thing, as I felt ill-equipped to take any.
    It seemed like the norm in Narragansett to put your life on hold—so many of the wives always talking to me about what they would do if (and only if) they could get out of town, how differently they would live then. Like Sue #2, for example—she’d always wanted to move to Montana; Nicole #4—Michigan; Theresa #1—Nevada; Beth #3—Arizona. But always somewhere landlocked, always somewhere opposite, as if the opposite held the answer.
    Still, my lack of return trips home bordered on unmanageable for my parents, especially for my mother, even with her daily phone calls to me. And they were, always, daily. But she too slowly began acquiescing to our biweekly dinners somewhere in the middle, usually Hartford or Westport. It was just smarter that way. It made it easier for all of us that way to pretend our real lives weren’t so far apart.
    I would never admit it out loud, but I did miss coming home. As hard as Scarsdale sometimes was for me, growing up, I’d always loved everything about my family’s actual house: my bedroom exactly as it had been since my twelfth birthday—a grown-up room for back then—no flowery wallpaper or purple carpet. Just soft yellow walls, wide-circle throw rugs and picture frames, long gold silk on the windowsills. The windows themselves were a stainless glass that looked out over the backyard, the hilly enterprise of it, separate from the rest of the house.
    The first floor was just one large window-filled room, everything swimming into everything else: living area, dining room, kitchen. Sun area nook.
    Then there was the wraparound porch. It was the first thing you’d see when you walked up the front walkway: the large evergreens and small potted flowers, the long pillowed bench running the length of the porch. As Josh and I headed toward it, I saw that someone was lying on it—the bench—a familiar someone. Jaime Daniel Berringer. Josh’s best friend since before I was born. Long and lanky, with a pile of blond floppy hair on his head. Little-boy good-looking in a way that stops you until you know him. Then it stops stopping you.
    And like a million times before, there he was, just lying there on his back, his eyes closed, a bowl of cereal on his chest. Berringer always had a bowl of cereal on his chest—his food of choice for as long as I’d known him—a fact that was particularly bizarre, considering that he was now the chef at a nationally renowned French restaurant right outside of San Francisco.
    Josh and I stood in the doorway, staring down at him. “You think that he’s sleeping?” I whispered.
    Berringer started to smile, but then tried to hide it, continuing to lie there, pretending to sleep.
    Josh put his finger to his lips, motioning