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“That’s why we booked this get-away,” Maggie explains. “He wouldn’t have said yes otherwise. Our youngest is eleven. We’ve left the oldest in charge. Sara is seventeen.” Maggie adds a confident, “Very trustworthy.”
“So you think.”
She hits him again, and he grins, glancing toward the window. “No street lamps?”
Jaxson answers, “Nope. The more you get into the country up here, the more the stars.”
I sigh, “I can’t wait.”
Steven offers up to the group for those who may not understood, “Less light, more ability to see the stars at night.”
I stop myself from saying, Thank you Captain Obvious. Instead I decide to dive deeper into my companion’s lives. “So we know why Maggie and Pete are here.” Directing my question to the Brooklyn girls I ask, “How about you guys?”
“Breakups,” they say at the same time.
“Both of you?”
“Yep,” and “Uh huh,” makes the group nod our heads, except for Dax whose head must stay still.
I continue, “We know Marco is also going through a breakup of the worst kind. Divorce, I’m so sorry.” He just stares at me, dark cloud giving no room to be friendly. So I change focus to, “Laura?”
New Hampshire shrugs on a smile, “Vacation. I own a waste management company, but I haven’t taken a break in over a decade. I have a daughter, Jennifer, but she’s always with her friends now. Sixteen. You know how teenagers are. She’s trustworthy enough, though. Her best friend is a teetotaler, and valedictorian. I’m pretty sure they’ll just be watching movies and that’s all. So I decided on some me-time. She was happy for me, actually. And I don’t have a passport at the moment so…”
“Same!” I grin, motioning between us. “I looked up U.S.A. retreats for that exact reason!” To Jaxson I call up, “No offense.”
He chuckles, turning the wheel right, foot gently on the brake at a yellow sign reading 25MPH with an arrow that signifies up ahead.
“What about you, Dax?”
“I’m an artist and I came to paint the cows.”
Silence for a beat, then a lot of ‘okay-then’ nodding heads.
I can’t help myself, “Not the chickens?”
“I hate chickens.”
“Sure. Well, that makes sense.” No, it really doesn’t. “I mean they can be…” I stop talking, hoping Dax’ll fill in the blanks. They don’t.
I kinda love them. But I have a thing for creatives.
“Steven?”
He looks at me. “I’m learning to be a yoga instructor. This year I’ve been traveling from retreat to retreat to learn what’s out there.”
Jaxson offers from the front. “I’ll be interested in how we stack up.”
Maggie asks, “What do you do, Willow?”
“I work in advertising.”
“Oh, how fascinating!”
“Mmm, not really. I don’t write the campaigns, or sit in any of those creative think-tanks you see in the movies. I’m administrative. All numbers and accounts and…yeah.”
“You sound like you’re not happy there.”
“Mmm…I have a dream of doing something else.”
