All the Summers Ahead →
I’m thrilled to bits to have a story up on Five Chapters this week:
Ellen was having lunch with Abby at Souen on West Thirteenth Street. One of their monthly lunches, though it was difficult now, finding time to meet.
“You should move out near us,” Abby said.
Their house — Abby and her husband’s, in New Jersey — was finally finished. They taught at NYU. Abby admitted to the expected suburban explanations: yard, space, school. Ellen understood; but that distance every morning and night…
“We could be train buddies,” Abby said. “Pick a Jersey boy for you.”
“I had a principle to never go to New Jersey,” Ellen said.
“I know, it’s different for us — the kids. The dog.”
Out the restaurant window Ellen saw the asphalt roof from her bedroom, the gravel beach and barbed wire below it, the surge of the East River to a hundred blocks of Manhattan. Until September.
