Reunion: A Novel by Hannah Pittard Read Free Book Online

straightening my blouse and returning fully to consciousness.
    “You take care,” she says.
    Yes , I think. Take care. But take care of what, exactly?

7
concourse to concourse
    T he first thing I do is check the monitors. Nell and Elliot’s flight is delayed. They’re two concourses away from me and so I make my way somewhat wearily down the escalators in the direction of the airport train.
    This place, Atlanta, this place where I grew up, it is instantly the same and instantly different. The airport seems both smaller and larger. It is brighter and sharper and louder. It is definitely more crowded. Still, I can’t help it; I look around as I wait for the next train and wonder if it was here, or maybe there, or maybe even just beyond, that my mother and father paused, returning home from a trip to Italy, and snapped a photo of me asleep in my narrow stroller, two years old at most, my head bent off to the side, my tiny khaki peacoat buttoned completely up the middle. The thought is so maudlin that it embarrasses me, but I let myself indulge in it anyway. In part because even though it really is a possibility that the stroller was right there more than thirty years ago, it’s also a reality that this place is not the same. Too many people have traveled over that stretch of terrazzo—too much wax, too much trash—for it to be the same, for it to be the place of anybody’s memories, much less mine.
    The train comes. I enter. This hollow feeling inside me, it is not sadness for my father. I do not want to mistake it for what it is not. I do not want anyone to mistake it for what it is not. But what then? Is it Peter? Is this feeling really for Peter? Is it for Atlanta? For my childhood? The uncertainty of my future? Do I really suffer from all the same regrets that every other person on this space-age train is suffering from? I never wanted to be so common. I never wanted to be so obvious. Stan Pulaski would be furious.
    My phone buzzes. I didn’t turn it on after the flight, which means that I forgot to turn it off before takeoff. Sometimes I really do hate breaking the rules. Other times it’s a fleeting moment of proof that the world has gone crazy with regulations. But that sort of confirmation is ultimately flat. Ultimately not that great a reward. You mean we really have gone too far? Huh. Big surprise. Maybe it’s just this sort of haphazard back-and-forth that got me into trouble with Billy. If I’d just been more casual with my feelings on adultery before committing it, then maybe when it presented itself it wouldn’t have felt so big, so bad, so fresh and new. If I hadn’t adopted my siblings’ (
the family’s
) hardball theory—you cheat, you die—then maybe I wouldn’t have been so tempted. What a strange and unexpected discovery to have made: not that I am disappointed with my life, but that I am disappointed with myself.
    I look at my phone. It’s Rita, not Peter, and I get this homesick gush in my belly and I know, with utter certainty that at least for my immediate future, whenever the phone rings I will have to contend with the disappointment of it not being Peter. This is beyond my control.
    “Rita,” I say. “I’m on a train. Can you hear me?”
    “I can hear you,” she says. In the background, there are the giggly voices of her children, my nieces.
    “They haven’t landed,” I say.
    “No,” she says. “I know. I was calling to tell you they’re delayed.”
    The train stops at their concourse. I wheel my bag off and head now toward the upward escalators.
    “This place is a maze,” I say. “I go down to go up to go down.”
    “Sounds like life,” she says. Sometimes I forget that Rita isn’t just a mom, that in another world, in another life, before Joe was born and even for a little while after, she was an investment banker with a job and a brain and a checking account all her own. Is it the fate of all mothers—no matter how much they love their children—to look