“We only worry because we love you. You know that, right?”
I nodded. “Yes,” I said, knowing that the nodding wouldn’t exactly be effective over the phone. “And I love you, too.” I took a deep breath.
Time to talk about something else.
“So what’s new at the Jackson house today?” I asked, hoping she would take the bait this time.
“Not much. I have to go to the hardware store later to look at some paint samples for the dining room, but right now I’m doing laundry,” she said. “Lots and lots of laundry. The amount of laundry that little people generate boggles the mind. I literally run at least one load every day!” She laughed, and I could hear the breathlessness creep in, a sign that she was pushing it a bit too hard. “When it was just Mike and me, laundry happened every few days. But now? Every day.”
“And it’s just going to get worse, you know,” I teased her, thinking of my sister’s three children and a fourth one that was soon to follow. We were running into the final countdown on her due date.
“Don’t remind me,” she moaned in mock resignation. “Burp cloths, bibs, towels, and even more eensie weensie sets of clothes. With all this technology, you’d think we’d have robots to take care of all this stuff like they did on The Jetsons.”
“Be nice, wouldn’t it?” I asked with a smile, knowing that she didn’t really mind. Charlie was being a wife and a mother and raising a family that she adored. She was happy with her life, even if it did require copious amounts of laundry detergent sometimes.
“I did have a reason for my call, other than to discuss my laundry woes with you, you know.”
“I thought as much,” I replied, playing dumb, not sure I wanted to hear where she was going with this.
She sighed, loud and long. “Okay. We really, really think you need to take a vacation, Dellie. A real one, one that lasts more than a weekend. More like a month,” she said.
I got up from my chair, feeling the tense muscles in my legs protest slightly. I’d been sitting way too long, glued to my chair in hopes that some stray thought might jump-start an actual burst of legitimate productivity, afraid that if I got up and away from my computer that I would miss the golden window of opportunity, should one present itself.
Alas, so far, all doors and windows, golden or otherwise, had not been forthcoming. Now seemed as good a time as any to get up from my throne of idleness and move around a little.
I started to pace.
“And I know you say you can’t take time away from work and you can’t afford it, but hear me out,” she pleaded.
“Hearing,” I said dubiously.
I paused in my pacing to peek out my living room window through a slight break in the blinds. As per usual, the neighbor one unit down and to my left was giving the entire apartment complex a visual feast, sporting an ill-fitting white wife beater tank top stretched over his sizable beer gut to barely meet the top of faded madras shorts. Madras.
He’s dressed up today, I thought absurdly.
“Getting away for awhile, even just to be in a new place, would be good for you. It might even get you out of your creative funk. And don’t say you’re not having one—you told me last week when we talked that you felt like the stuff you were working on was…less than inspiring?” she said, obviously searching for a kinder word than I had used in our previous conversation.
I raised an eyebrow.
“So since you’re so convinced you can’t actually put work on hold for a bit, take it with you. That’s one of the nice things about your job, remember? You can take it anywhere you want to go,” she barreled on.
“Aren’t you forgetting about the money thing?” I asked, sure I was going to bring this idea crashing back to reality. “And what about interviews?”
“You do those over the phone most of the time, and you know it,” she retorted. She was determined to make me come around.
“Not always, Charlie. Sometimes I actually have to go to meet these people when I write an article. And besides, maybe I’m too busy with things to just pick up and pack up and go.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. I could tell she was trying to muster every ounce of patience she had in her. And, as the mother of three small children, she had patience in spades.
“I know you have a lot of jobs going, Dellie, and I’m really proud of you for that. We’re all really proud of you,” she said gently. “But you need some time away from here, some space. Some fresh air, if you want to put it that way. It would be good for you to get out of your routine for a bit.”
“I happen to like routine,” I said, far from convinced by her argument and wanting desperately to get off the phone.
Charlie sighed. Clearly, this was not going the way she wanted it to.
Tough cookies.
“I know you do. But you’re also a slave to it, Odelle Simms. It controls you, rather than the other way around. You realize that, don’t you, Dellie?”
I glared down at my toes in frustration, feeling misunderstood and wishing I could glare at her in person. We may have lived only forty-five minutes from one another, but it was at times like this that those forty-five minutes seemed like light-years.
“If nothing else, maybe you could find some more people to write for—new magazines that would like to work with you?” she suggested, forced pleasantness creeping into her voice.
She was tiring of this argument as much as I was.
My mouth clamped shut, biting back my protest. I hadn’t actually thought about that. New contacts, new markets to reach. It was starting to sound interesting. Maybe she was onto something with that one. Still, the whole idea of this was overwhelming; there were far too many factors to weigh in, complications that could potentially tangle me up into a bigger mess than I already felt like I was in.
“Don’t put a limit on your dreams, Dellie,” Charlie said, breaking in to my rampant thoughts. “You got enough of that from your husband.”
The words felt like a slap in the face. A bucket of ice water.
My nose stung with looming tears.
“Don’t let him win this one,” she whispered. I could hear the tears in her voice, even with the phone line between us.
How did she do this to me? I wondered as water pooled in my eyes and trickled slowly down my cheeks.
“Charlie, I—” I sniffed, hearing my voice crack.
“Just think about it, please? Promise?”
I nodded into the phone, still staring down at my toes but no longer seeing them.
“Dellie?”
“I promise,” I squeaked back.
I knew, as I hung up, that this was one promise I would not easily break, as unsettling as the idea was for me. It was impetuous and adventurous, something I hadn’t allowed myself to be for a long time—even before I’d taken the walk down the aisle to start my short-lived failure of a marriage. This was one promise, one idea, that would haunt me for days, torturing my wakeful hours and whispering to me in my sleep.
Don’t limit your dreams, Dellie, I heard a voice whisper. Let go and dream them.
“My sister thinks I need a vacation. A long one. Like, a month-long one,” I said to my friend Bette a week later over lunch.
She looked