The pavement is slick and shiny as she winds her way south along Highland Road, riding the brake in anticipation of joggers and deer. Tendrils of mist obscure portions of the highway she knows so well.
Growing up in Mundy’s Landing, she longed for the day she could leave the village behind. But when it finally arrived, she found herself longing to go back home. It took her well over a decade to do that. After a year as a commuter student at Hadley, the only college willing to admit her, probably only because the admissions -people were local and knew about her recently deceased mother, she transferred to her mother’s alma mater, the University of Buffalo. Like Mom, she majored in education, not because she particularly wanted to become a teacher, but because it made her feel closer to her mother and it made her widowed father happy.
Weary of western New York winters, she went south to Virginia for her master’s. But while she was back home over Christmas break, she met Asa Jacob Mundy IV, though no one ever called him that. He was just Jake. He was seven years older than Rowan, having graduated high school just ahead of her oldest brother, Mitch.
Like most graduates of Mundy’s Landing High School during their era, Jake had gone away to college and stayed away. His father had died fairly young and his mother was still living in Mundy’s Landing, but she’s long since settled in Texas with Jake’s older sister, Liza.
Jake hadn’t strayed so far: he was working for an ad agency in New York City when Rowan met him.
They were married the June after she got her master’s degree. She’d had her fill of steamy Southern summers and welcomed the chance to move North again. She found a teaching position in the New York suburbs and that’s where they settled. Her father adored Jake—-not just because everyone likes Jake, but because he was a hometown boy, a Mundy.
Dad lived to walk Rowan down the aisle and hold her firstborn, but died while she was pregnant with her second. He never met the daughter Rowan named for her mother, or his own namesake, Mick; never got to see her come full circle back to Mundy’s Landing.
Not a day goes by that she doesn’t long for her parents or remember the promises she made to them both and struggled so hard to keep.
What would they think of her now?
They wouldn’t be proud of me—-that’s for damned sure.
Resisting the urge to feel sorry for herself, Rowan swallows over the lump in her throat and merges onto the thruway headed toward New York City, determined to make things right again.
The drive should take only two hours, but three and a half have passed before she’s finally pulling into a parking garage in the West Fifties. It was pouring by the time she reached the northern suburbs, and steady traffic gave way to notorious holiday gridlock within the city limits.
She’d expected to have plenty of time to gather her emotions before meeting Rick, but she’s got less than fifteen minutes to make her way to the Hell’s Kitchen restaurant he’d suggested. She covers those blocks beneath a dripping umbrella, pausing on every corner to exchange texts with Jake, who’s back home and filled with the usual questions about where to find things that have gone missing in the laundry room or kitchen. A phone call would be easier, but she knows there’ll be no passing off the rumbles, honks, and shouts of urban street noise for a shopping mall.
She signs off with a quick “TTYL” when she arrives at the designated meeting spot.
It appears to be more of a no--frills coffee shop than the upscale café she was for some reason anticipating. He suggested it, saying it was close to the West Side Highway and the PATH trains to Jersey, where he now lives . . . alone.
That his marriage to Vanessa didn’t survive probably shouldn’t surprise Rowan, but it does.