When Are You Coming Home? by Bryn Chancellor

Author:Bryn Chancellor [Chancellor, Bryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC029000 Fiction / Short Stories (single Author)
ISBN: 9780803284760
Publisher: Nebraska
Published: 2015-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

At the Terminal

Francie should have had a suitcase. Something in understated tweed, perhaps, or maybe one of those old hardsides with a matching train case, or a rolling duffel at least. At her age, she should have worn a better outfit than a T-shirt and baggy denim overalls and better shoes than her canvas sneakers. She fiddled with a strap on her faded red backpack, rolling the nylon in her fingers the way she used to roll cigarettes until she’d quit two months earlier. Her burgundy modified bob, blow-dried straight that morning right before Clive said, We need to talk, now frizzed in the damp Seattle air.

She was three hours early for her flight home to Phoenix. Since she didn’t have to check luggage, she waited on a cement bench outside the terminal, where city buses hissed and groaned and exhaust fumes mingled with the odor of potted vincas and geraniums. A late-summer storm had blown through, and she shivered in her short sleeves—in Phoenix, it would be over a hundred degrees. The sky was still dark, the clouds discordant, dropping rain in light, skittish bursts. Rainwater dripped from the roof onto the concrete, plop, plop, plop. Francie kept her sunglasses on and shoved a wilted tissue underneath them from time to time. She looked up, and a drop of water landed on her forehead—plop.

Francie took out her cell phone and dialed her sister, Jean. Francie had met Clive, indirectly, through Jean: She had bought Francie a DSL connection and Internet dating subscription for Francie’s thirty-fourth birthday.

On the night of Francie’s birthday, Jean had handed her the gift certificate and said, “Now, don’t freak out.”

They were washing birthday-dinner dishes at Jean and her husband’s house in Tempe near the university, where Jean was an assistant professor of anthropology and working on a study of single women in the twenty-first century. At thirty-two, Jean was married and up for tenure. Francie worked as a hair colorist, a now-four-year career that her mother and father, both economics professors, called a delayed backpacking trip to Europe.

Francie said, “I’m not your guinea pig, Jeanie.”

“No, you’re my sister. And you need to get out of the house.”

“I like my house.” Francie rented a one-bedroom guest house, where she stayed in on weekends, listening to the same CDs for weeks at a time, where she ate soup with her face too close to the bowl, where she locked the door the second she was inside and checked it again in the middle of the night. The part she did like was the dark, grassy backyard, from which she could see stars and planets. She’d been tracking the progress of Mars since August because she had read that it was closer to Earth than it had been in centuries. She’d sit out there with some Johnny Cash or Steve Earle on the stereo, and she felt safe, happy even, looking up.

Jean said, “I’m telling you now, honey, it doesn’t like you. When was the last time you had a date? Don’t make me ask about sex.

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