19,401 ~ 21,500

It wasn’t even 7am and Sam was buzzing. She was driving East on I-96 headed towards Grand Rapids, Michigan. She would pass through Kalamazoo and Fort Wayne, Indiana before crossing the Indiana - Ohio border. It was all known somewhat known territory until she got to the border. Sam had never been to Hamilton or Cincinnati, Ohio, before. She hoped that her navigation wouldn’t let her down. Before leaving Muskegon, Sam had stopped at Wesco for coffee and had pulled the old photo of Jean and Ruth out of the box. It was now wedged into her console. It covered up her tachometer, but Sam seldom if ever looked at it anyway. The picture fascinated her and she wanted to be able to study it. Before leaving the gas station she had programmed Ruth’s childhood address into her navigation app on her iPhone. Sam did the quick math in her head - 6:45am plus six hours, minus an hour for the time zone change at the Indiana - Michigan line, would put her in Hamilton right at noon or thereabouts.

“Perfect,” thought Sam. “I can get a quick lunch, check out Ruth’s old house and still have time to make it to the Hamilton school district offices before 5pm”. It was going to be a hurry-up and wait kind of day, but all travel days were like that.

Luckily, the Xterra, even though she was nearly eight years old and had over 120,000 miles on her, was incredibly reliable. Sam knew she could push her as hard as she needed to and the SUV would respond. This was far from their first extended road trip together. In addition to driving to Minnesota for the annual Mom visit, Sam had driven from Austin to Little Rock, Austin to Oklahoma City, Austin to Houston, Austin to Muskegon, Austin to Dallas, and once from Austin to Las Vegas for a friend’s birthday. A series of long-distance girlfriends had made Sam and her Xterra good friends. She’d had to replace the radiator and transmission the year before, but that was all Sam had ever done besides change the oil and get new tires. That old silver SUV had seen her through a lot and even though she could easily afford something newer, Sam was resolute. The Xterra wasn’t going anywhere until it couldn’t go anywhere any more.

Sam glanced at the old black and white picture one more time. Jean and Ruthie were clearly close friends. And from the other pictures in the box, they had been for most of their childhoods. Leaving each other must have been difficult, but losing each other as pen pals even more so. It begged so many questions. Why did her grandparents not want Jean to communicate with Ruth? Clearly they were ok with the girls’ friendship before the family moved to Michigan. Or maybe they weren’t but couldn’t find a way to keep them apart. Maybe it was because Ruth was Jewish. Ruth Goldman sure sounded like a Jewish name and times were different in the late 1950s. Or maybe Ruth was a bad kid, a truant or poor student. Maybe Sam’s grandparents had seen the writing on the wall. Maybe they knew that Ruth was going to grow up to be trouble for Jean. Maybe they saw the move as an easy way to separate them. After all, Jean and Ruth were still just kids. Distance and life would make them forget about each other soon enough. Sam’s grandparents may have simply tried to speed up the process by co-opting their letters to each other.

But still, poor Jean. One day, the letters just stopped. It must have been hard because it seemed like Jean had written a couple more times; letters that had never been sent. Sam wondered how Ruth had felt. The letters would have just stopped on her end, too. Until Jean moved away, the girls had been seemingly inseparable. Realistically they could have stayed pen pals for a goodly long time, maybe even throughout their lives. They could have finished school, gotten married, had children, and continued to write to each other. Sam had heard of people doing that. However, for some unknown reason, her grandparents, who had actually been very nice people, stopped it.

“Weird,” thought Sam. “Weird.”

 

~

 

As she drove South through the Indiana countryside, Sam’s thoughts meandered from her mom and Ruth to Malin and back again. The moment Sam met Malin at Al’s all those years before, she’d known that she could be The One. Typical of many of Sam’s crushes, Malin was unavailable. She was straight and lived a zillion miles away from Austin. Seemingly, this was how Sam liked her women, or so her friends always told her. Since Shay, Sam had dated a few available women, like Holly, but she truly preferred women who were slightly more ‘challenging’- those who were straight and/or married or those who were lesbian and lived a minimum of two hundred miles away. ‘Challenging’ was Sam’s word. Her friends called them ‘inaccessible’. Malin was both.

“You need to find someone real. Someone local. Someone who actually wants a relationship with a woman. Why do you always go for the one’s you’ll never get?” concerned friends would go on and on. “These straight ones are just going to hurt you.”

Sam had an answer for everything. First of all, she did get them, the married and/or straight ones. For awhile anyway, which was perfectly ok with Sam, once she got over the Break Up Diet. Secondly, the straight ones may hurt but they hurt a lot less than the potentially ‘real’ ones who make all kinds of promises they never manage to keep. Thirdly, Sam was done with dating and women and relationships. A crush on a beautiful, straight, challenging woman was good for her soul.

Seeing Malin again, though, made Sam pause a moment. If she was being honest, New York City had scared her a little. It had been a long time since Sam had shared any part of her writing career with a woman. Over the years, she’d learned to keep the two separate, but Malin was different. Annika Olssen was the first character Sam had written that was based on a real person that she knew. Emily, her editor, loved the character and suggested that Sam bring her inspiration to the book release. Sam didn’t think Malin would be able to come; it was hard for her to leave the bar for an extended period of time. Much to Sam’s giddy surprise, Malin said yes. Most of their friendship had been developed over the phone. Sam called Malin often to get character insights and for small details about life in Sweden and Stockholm in particular. After finishing the book, they continued talking but usually via text several times a week. They spoke once in awhile though most of their conversations centered around the book and the process of publication. Hanging out and spending time together was rare and limited only to Al’s Bar during Sam’s annual Mom Visit.

Sam remembered waiting anxiously in the hotel lobby for Malin to arrive. The plan was that Malin would fly in from Minnesota and take a taxi to the hotel where Sam would meet her. Even though she knew it would take awhile for Malin to get from the airport to the hotel, Sam went to the lobby immediately after receiving Malin's text that she had landed to wait. She sat. She paced. She read the sports section of the New York Times. She checked her Facebook and Twitter accounts on her iPhone. She went to the hotel bar and ordered a shot of Jagermeister even though it was barely 11am. She was nervous. Malin made her nervous. Sam reminded herself over and over again that Malin was straight and that this was simply going to be a friendly, fun few days in New York City. Sam had just finally settled into a chair with a view of the street when she saw the taxi pull up. The door opened and a thin blond woman emerged. She was wearing black jeans, black boots, and a black turtleneck sweater, all perfect for a Fall day in New York City. Her hair was pulled back into a small ponytail, the only giveaway that this black-clad metropolitan woman was Malin, the small town bar owner that Sam only ever seen in old jeans and tank tops or button-down shirts.

Her heart pounding, Sam resisted the urge to jump out of her chair and run to meet her friend at the door. Instead she casually walked toward the door and stood waiting a few steps away from the revolving door. As Malin pushed the door, she met Sam’s eyes. She wasn’t smiling. Sam remembered an instant of wondering what was wrong, but that instant ended quickly. When she was finally clear of the door, Malin dropped her bag do the floor with and took two long strides toward Sam. She took Sam’s face in her hands and kissed her on the mouth slowly and softly yet purposely. As Sam returned the kiss, she could feel Malin smile.

When Malin finally pulled back, Sam asked, “So, I thought you were straight?”

“Not this weekend,” was Malin’s reply.

The next four days were four of the best of Sam’s life. When they finally parted at the airport on Tuesday afternoon, Sam knew she was in love. And in deep trouble. Sam promised to call and text and she did. Then she didn’t. After a week, Sam was thoroughly terrified. She couldn’t stop thinking about Malin and their time together. It wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Malin was supposed to be straight. They weren’t supposed to have so much fun together. They weren’t supposed to be so in sync. Above all, Malin was supposed to be a crush, not a real love interest. But still, Sam couldn’t help it. She hadn’t felt this way since Shay. “Damn, Shay”, Sam recalled thinking. She stopped returning Malin’s texts and didn’t even listen to her voice mails. Less than two weeks after their long weekend, communication between them had stopped all together.

Until Sam walked into Al’s the previous Saturday night. It had been more than six months, but seeing Malin again had renewed all the feelings Sam had tried so hard to leave behind. Sam had no idea what to do. And then there was the girlfriend, Jackie. She seemed nice and Malin seemed happy, not ecstatic like with Sam in New York, but happy enough, Sam supposed. And really, was Sam going to move to Center City and live less than five miles from her mother and Allison? Austin was her home and had been for a long time. Moving wasn’t an option. It wasn’t an option for Malin either, if Sam was being perfectly honest. Plus, Sam thought, there was the one main overriding fact - she was single and liked being single so much that she had stopped dating, long before New York City and Malin Jonassen. She never going to be in a committed relationship again. Ever.

 

~

 

Sam was snapped back to reality when her navigation began insisting that she make a turn in a half mile, a quarter mile, seven hundred yards, then finally one hundred and fifty feet. She was apparently in Hamilton, Ohio and nearing Ruth’s old house. She slowed and drove carefully through the old neighborhood. The houses were all clearly built in the early part of the twentieth century. Most had been fixed up; by no means was this a run-down old neighborhood. From the looks of it, this was The Place to live for folks who wanted an older, more historical home in a nice neighborhood. Sam couldn’t tell if this had always been so. Several areas of Austin had benefited from reclamation projects in recent years. Either way, Jean and Ruth’s old stomping ground didn’t seem the worse for wear.

 

As her navigation app told her that she had reached her destination on the right, Sam eased the Xterra to a stop in front of a yellow and white house. Sam pulled the old picture from its place on her dashboard. She looked at the picture and up at the house. A white picket fence had been added around the small front yard, but the stoop was clearly the same. As Sam turned off the engine, she saw a woman in the front yard. She wore a wide brimmed gardening hat and was bent over a flower bed to the right of the front door. With her heart beating fast, Sam got out of the SUV and motioned to Kate to follow. She strode around the front of the Xterra and stood at the gate.

“Excuse me, Ma’am,” Sam said, her voice cracking slightly.

The woman turned and stood. She was wearing a flowered shirt and an old brown cardigan. Sam’s father had owned one like it years ago. Her denim capris were faded and there was dirt on the knees.

“Yes?” she asked.