When she stopped walking, she sat on the couch, ignoring her huge to-do list (unpack, tweak syllabuses for fall semester, reply to new department chair’s week-old e-mail about her IT setup, research and work on article, talk to neighbors? get shit together). Instead she watched baseball and tracked the pitches—sliders, split fingers, cutters—as she cupped her fingers around an imaginary ball. Nights cooled down enough to open the window, and she could hear cheers and the muffled voice of an announcer on the PA, remembering how she and her brother had narrated their backyard practice sessions (Drennan throws a nasty slider in the dirt, oh and he chases!). Through a slit in the blinds, she could see the glow of the ball field over the tops of the sycamores and cottonwoods, and she thought about walking over but didn’t. Instead she obsessively checked her e-mail, or read forums about venomous snakes, poison ivy, and black widow spiders, or investigated reasons for the new ache in her knee—arthritis? Baker’s cyst?—or she browsed social media for the friends with whom she’d lost touch during her marriage. She’d tried to block news of Charlie and the Girlfriend but twice stumbled on photos, and she zoomed in on the girl’s smooth face, looking for acne but finding only adorable freckles. The girl looked straight at the camera, her chin tilted upward, and Laura thought, Look at her. Standing there in her little jean skirt as if she had all the time in the world.
When she didn’t walk, she left voicemails on her parents’ home phone, sometimes twice a day, as she always had, but now they didn’t always return her calls as promptly; they were newly retired, busy traveling and sprucing up her childhood home to sell it. She called her brother but chatted with her sister-in-law because he was working overtime on a delayed bridge project as well as hauling his sons to music camp and swim lessons and Little League games. She heard her mother’s voice in her ear, a sliver from the litany of the past months: At least you’re young enough to start over. As Laura watched the Padres lose to the Giants again and picked at the dirt under her fingernails, it dawned on her that she and her parents were on a parallel path. All starting over. Except, of course, her parents’ do-over was part of a long-held plan—their fortieth anniversary was in two months. Hers was an attempt at an entire split from the past. Burn the whole fucking thing down and see if she could rise from the ashes. As she and Charlie had divided up and sold their sweet little ranch near Rose Canyon, as she took the only tenure-track job she was offered, her mantra was Tabula rasa, motherfuckers! But it turned out she had no idea where such a blank slate ended and where she began. She grew exhausted with dissecting herself, with seeing the shrunken, formaldehyde parts of her laid bare. So she walked. She walked because she knew how to do it without thinking: one foot and then another. There she found only immediate stimuli: heat, rocks, insects, trash bag nestled in weeds, maybe-a-snake. She walked, she walked, she walked.
By July, she began to vary her routes and walked in the mornings to beat the afternoon storms, which Maud and others called the monsoon—a debatable term, according to the Internet, for the storms that rolled up from the Gulf of Mexico. Whatever they were called, they flayed the sky with lightning and carved channels into the dry earth with ferocious bursts of rain. Some days, though not often, she rose early enough to see a man on a bicycle deliver copies of the local newspaper, tossing them from his basket like wrapped fish. She walked down Main Street, where she memorized the stores in what Maud called the District, a stretch of shops and eateries bordering the college, where her new office and new students awaited. She walked on the brick sidewalk past the Snip and Clip, Pie in the Sky Pizza, and Wolf’s Den Books, close enough to run her fingers along windowpanes. She walked past the Patty Melt Diner with its red vinyl booths and whiffs of onion rings, past Casa Verde Restaurante and its apple-green door, past the tinted windows of the Pickaxe Bar and Grill. She stopped at the Woodchute Motor Lodge to admire a parked car decorated from hood to tail with bottle caps and colored glass; she waved to an elderly couple lounging in a vintage red-and-white metal glider outside Room 8. At Alligator Juniper, the one coffee shop in town, she dug change out of the rocks in her pockets for an iced coffee, heavy on the cream. She splurged on a bear claw at the bakery next door. She walked to the grocery store, using her credit card for soup and generic granola bars and veggie burgers and peanut butter; she wouldn’t get her first paycheck until the first of October, and the divorce and move had drained her dry. As she walked, locals glanced up, smiled; she imagined they whispered once she passed—New history and Latin American studies professor, lives alone in Ms. Byrd’s old house behind the high school—details delivered, no doubt, by Maud. Soon she would see students everywhere: no doubt they would wave and call out, Hey, Professor Drennan! Hey! Is our paper still due tomorrow? She walked, and she pulled her lime-green visor low over her eyes.