“No!” her mom exclaimed.
“’Bout damn time,” her grandpa muttered, poorly disguising pride.
“When?” her mom asked, excitement nearly contagious enough for Rae to catch it.
“Six weeks. I’m coming home in six weeks.”
The wordhomedidn’t fit anymore, but she figured it would again, with enough practice.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
SELLING ASSETS
“Sell or hold?” Ellen asked, standing at Rae’s dresser on a Friday night and holding up a black, leather-ish miniskirt, a staple of their early-twenties days.
Rae was moving to Indianapolis on Sunday, shipping just the essentials and selling the rest at a secondhand store.
Rae glanced up from the kitchen, where she was kneeling in front of the oven, clearing scuffed black pumps from the oven rack storage. She’d been eating all her dinners at the office and had found a more practical use for the oven than cooking.
“Sell,” she said, physically cold thinking about all those times she’d worn the tiny piece of fabric in the dead of winter, waiting in line for irrationally exclusive bars and clubs.
“How about this?” Ellen asked, pointing to a pilled black sweater that Rae had worn relentlessly over the years, creatively pairing it with different scarves and necklaces to create the illusion of a diverse wardrobe.
“Sell,” Rae said, as she added her bathrobe and Santa hat to the giveaway pile. “Sell it all.”
“For such a sentimental person, you’re not fazed by parting with all of your belongings,” Ellen said.
It was true. She ached at leaving Ellen but otherwise felt eerily little attachment to any part of her life here. “Guess I left my heart on Perry Street,” she said. “Even if Wall Street took my soul.”
“You still have your full heartandsoul,” Ellen said, but they both knew this was an exaggeration and Lorimer Street had been where the real emotional carnage occurred.
She was leaving the apartment furnished for the next tenant, just as the tenant before her had done. Rae wondered if New York’s kindest acts weren’t acts of kindness at all but acts of fatigue—too tired to move furniture across the country, you left it for the next person. Too tired to carve out personal space on the subway, you let someone cram in next to you. Too tired to wait for the barista to make you a new latte with oat milk instead of almond milk, you told him not to worry about it.
Clearing out beneath her bed, she encountered the bag of golf clubs her dad had sent her for college graduation in lieu of attending the ceremony. She put the whole bag in the sell pile but one by one extracted clubs that might come in handy for corporate golf outings—just the driver and putter, and then the seven iron, then the nine iron too. In the end, she kept every club except the sand wedge, which gave her the feeling of being stuck.
She also came across the Stall Street Journal, which had been untouched under her bed where she had tossed it after her stovetop bonfire. Odds were slim that the store would give her anything for a half-used pocket-sized journal, but maybe Ellen could persuade them to take it for free. There was a certain comfort in considering that someone else might fill the rest of the pages with real poems, even if hers had never gotten past the bullet-point phase.
“You can’t toss this one,” Ellen said, from the kitchenette now. She was holding up the signature scramblette spatula. “I’m not allowing it.”
“You take it,” Rae said. “I bequest it.”
“But you’ll have a bigger kitchen in your Midwest mansion.”
Rae was moving into a two-bedroom Indianapolis apartment, and Ellen had been getting a thrill at the notion that Rae would have asparebedroom—the adultness, the elegance of it!
“Please,” Rae said quietly. “Take it.” She didn’t want to picture herself all alone in her too-big apartment, still failing at flipping omelets. The point of moving was to move on.
“Fine,” Ellen said, and stashed the spatula in her bag, along with the card Rae had given her, which she’d instructed her not to open until she got home. “We’ll use it together when you visit.”
They let themselves picture it—Rae would fly back every other month and they’d walk along the Hudson River arm in arm and stay up late drinking just enough wine to get them giggling like they had in their midtwenties, but not so much wine that they’d fall victim to late-twenties hangovers, and in the morning they’d cook flawless omelets and praise themselves for how far they’d come.
“Three boxes,” Rae said, when they were done sorting. “That’s all I’m taking away from New York.”
What had she been doing for the past ten years—sprinting down a well-lit, poorly understood path, amassing nothing she cared to keep? She’d come here for college, so sure she’d reach her big literary dreams in this city, so sure she’d meet her husband here and live out her own Broadway-worthy love story. Instead, all her diamond-clad dreams had dissolved into dust. She was leaving the city all alone, waving her flimsy white flag that no one would even look up from their phones to notice.
“And a best friend you’re stuck with for life,” Ellen said.
“Yes,” Rae said with a begrudging smile. “That too.”
