When she’d started out in finance, she’d thought inching up the ladder would take decades of grit-your-teeth-and-be-the-bitch blood, sweat, and pain. But the volatility of the early years—the low lows of threeA.M.ASAP emails and being chewed out by wannabe bosses for accidentally printing a document double sided; the high highs ofsneaking out of the office for a ten-minute walk with TB or GQ or unexpectedly getting Sunday off—had mellowed into a steady routine of ten-hour days ranging fromnot greattohalfway decent.
On the middle rung she’d reached, she could coast along. It would be hard to rise up much farther, but even harder to fall off completely.
In a resurgence of ambition after her New York trip with Stu, she’d drafted a multipage outline for what taking the plunge to full-time writer would look like. But as one predictable pay period settled into the next, she’d decided there was nothing wrong with keeping writing on the side. She’d written a poem about it—“On the Side Like Fries”—contemplating:If French fries were entrées, would their taste still amaze?
She and her boss walked into the parking lot, which had dozens of open spots and no car horns polluting the air. Eight months after her move to Indy, Rae was still getting used to these luxuries.
The afternoon was translucently overcast and warm enough to forgo a coat. Fall stretched longer here.
“I’m playing golf with a couple big clients on Saturday,” her boss said. “Want to join, if the weather holds?”
Rae had never been asked to join a golf business meeting. She started to say that she didn’t play but stopped short. She’d been hitting balls at the driving range and had even sent videos of her swing to her dad for him to provide feedback, which he had, down to the angle of how her left thumb should grip the club. She still wasn’t good enough to impress anyone, but she was decent enough not to embarrass herself, and she owed it to herself and women everywhere to say yes.
“I’d love to,” Rae said.
“Great,” her boss said. “We’ll play a scramble format.”
Rae smiled and mentally added the suffixette, deciding late-twenties scramblettes would be made on the golf course rather than in the kitchen. It seemed like a fitting metaphor for growing up and holding her own in a male-dominated industry.
Reaching his BMW, her boss fist-bumped Rae good-bye. “Nine o’clock tee time too early?” he asked.
Rae winced at the phrasetee time, habitually hearing it astea time, accompanied by the ambience of a Brooklyn café.
“That’s fine,” she said, opening the sticky door to old Fordable Francine. She still refused to trade in the truck, though Stu must’ve shown her a hundred options that were objectively better. “See you at nine.”
“So this is it,” Rae said, one night a couple weeks later, feet dangling from the back of Marlene.
The tailgate was down, and they were sitting side by side, looking out at Elmer Lake. Stu had picked her up and driven north to show her the plot of land he was thinking of buying, opposite the cottages where they’d spent their summers. She’d made a picnic of “chilled cheese” sandwiches that they were eating from an old, blue cooler.
“This is it,” Stu affirmed, eyes twinkling. “What do you think?”
It was a wooded lot, the trees reaching right down to the water. A single boat zigzagged across the surface, out for an end-of-season cruise, the motor the only man-made sound in earshot. The sun wouldn’t be setting for another hour or two, as the sky tried to hold on to fall even as the air was forfeiting to winter. The trees had dropped their leaves, making the lake look cold and naked. Rae had only ever been here in summer.
“The view looks different from this side of the lake,” she said, wrapping Stu’s jacket around her. She hadn’t worn a warm enough jacket, so he’d lent her a layer. She couldn’t pick out Our Little Yellow House from across the way, and it made her feel a little dizzy.
“The house’ll go there,” Stu said, pointing behind them. “And then we’ll put the dock there, and a bonfire pit over there and maybe a trampoline for the kids right there.”
“Kids?” Rae said, feeling a little nauseous from the windy back roads they’d taken.
“Well, yeah, I’m not trying to build a bachelor mansion here,” Stu said. “I know you’ve got your wholeWe need to date for a yearbefore getting engaged thinggoing on.” He mimicked her voice, and Rae couldn’t help but laugh along. “But in your words, I’m ‘bullish not bearish’ on us and just wanted to make sure you liked it before I made an offer on the land,” he said.
Rae had hoped that their trip to New York might’ve whet Stu’s appetite to explore the world, but it had only proven to him what he’d known all along—big-city people were living life backwards, upside down, and inside out. He’d literally kissed the ground when they’d gotten back to Indiana and doubled down on his decision to build a house on Elmer Lake, which had “all the food groups of a real good life,” as he said.
“It’s your dream place,” Rae commented.
“Ourdream place,” Stu corrected. He kissed her, and it tasted like iced tea with extra lemon.
Rae smiled, but she was finding it difficult to swallow, like the cheese from her sandwich was getting wedged in her throat.Wasthis her dream house? She couldn’t remember now. She’d never been one to dwell too much on a physical structure. Her dream home was more of a feeling than a place.
Stu put a hand on the ripped knee of her jeans and gave it a loving squeeze. “What’s it called when a movie starts and ends with the same scene?” he asked.
“A full-circle ending?”
“That’s it!” Stu said, looking at Rae like she was very brilliant for knowing this. “That’d kind of be like us on this lake, huh?”
She nodded. It felt like she was living out a feel-good, full-circle ending, but all the character development in the middle had fallen out. “It would be a crowd-pleaser movie for sure,” was all she could say.
“Don’t you think we’d be happy here, Raelynn?”
