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But Vinnie doesn’t look my way. He leaves.

And after he’s gone, Mary Beth deflates.

I want more than anything to talk some sense into her, but there’s just not an opportunity. We have to pose for enough family pictures to fill a dozen albums and package the leftover cake into individual boxes that are printed with my parents’ names and wedding date, and we have to hand one box to each guest on his way out the door.

By the time it’s just our family left, Nino is having a post-bakery-frosting meltdown, screaming and kicking on the floor, and my brother Frankie is helping Mary Beth wrestle him and Vince Junior into her car.

Then I’m back home with my parents, who are in a panic because nobody told them I was coming and my bed isn’t made up.

“Ma, it’s no big deal,” I say as she bustles around, pulling down blinds and shoving things into the closet. Apparently, they now use my room as a dumping ground for stuff that doesn’t fit anyplace else—bulky sweaters and magazine clippings and junk mail and toys the grandkids play with when they’re here.

I tell myself it shouldn’t bother me—after all, it’s their house, and I don’t even live here anymore—but I can’t help feeling resentful.

Was I expecting them to keep my room an untouched shrine in my absence?

Yes, apparently I was.

“How long are you staying?” my mother asks as she retrieves a set of worn, faded flowered sheets from
the top drawer of my dresser, where I used to keep my white cotton panties and my industrial-strength bras and my baby-sitting cash and, way in the back, my cigarettes and a dog-eared copy of
The Sensuous Woman.

“I’m staying until Monday,” I tell my mother.

“Monday!” She pauses in the process of stretching the ancient, shrunken fitted sheet over the sagging, stained twin mattress. “But that’s the day after tomorrow.”

“I know. I have to work on Tuesday.”

“Can’t you take a few days off?”

I shake my head and help her stretch the sheet. “I haven’t earned any vacation yet.”

She looks horrified. “What do you have to do to earn vacation?”

“Nothing, Ma, just work there for six months. Which I haven’t done yet.” I tug an elasticized corner of sheet beneath the mattress, and the opposite corner pops off.

“Well, do they know your family lives five hundred miles away?” She puts the opposite corner back on.

My corner pops off again. “Ma, it’s company policy.”

“What kind of company is this?”

“I told you, it’s an advertising—”

“No, I mean what kind of company holds a young girl hostage from her family?”

Okay. I’ve had it.

With her, and with the damned sheet.

But before I can say a word, she goes on to say, “And what kind of man turns his back on a woman for months at a time so that he can go be on the stage, singing and dancing?”

Here we go.

She’s never liked Will.

Nobody in my family has ever liked Will.

He has so many strikes against him:

1. He’s not from Brookside.
   
2. He didn’t stay in Brookside after he got here.
   
3. He looks, acts, and sounds different from anyone in Brookside.
   
4. And he took me away from Brookside…
   

Or so they assume. They can’t fathom that I’d ever have left on my own.

“Ma, Will’s an actor. Actors do summer stock. The fact that he’s gone for the summer has nothing to do with me or our relationship.”

She’s silent. She gives up on the fitted sheet and leaves one top corner untucked, turning her attention to the flat sheet. Her chin is set stubbornly. Not a good sign.

I watch her. I notice that everything about her is round. Her pouf of dark, sprayed hair. Her big dark eyes outlined in too much liner and mascara for the special occasion. Her face with its circular application of rouge. Her arms, her body, her butt—everything about her is elliptical. I’ve seen pictures of her in her
youth, and she was always pleasantly plump, but pretty. I wonder if I’ll look like her one day.

I try to imagine myself middle-aged. I try to imagine myself middle-aged, looking like my mother and married to Will.

I can’t.

Will, at middle age, will undoubtedly be a cross between Harrison Ford and Michael Douglas. And a man who looks like that won’t have a wife who looks like this.

I shake the thought, turning my attention back to the matter at hand.

“Ma, how’d you know Will’s gone, anyway? I didn’t tell you.”
Because I knew you’d react just like this.

“Mary Beth told me. She’s worried about you.”

“Mary Beth should worry about herself. She’s got enough problems with Vinnie still hanging around, leading her on.”

“They have two children, and they took marriage vows in the church, Tracey,” my mother retorts.

“But that doesn’t mean she should take him back!”

My mother says nothing, just takes a fleece blanket out of the closet and starts putting it on the bed.

“Ma, it’s July,” I say, stopping her. “I’ll roast under that thing.”

“Nights are chilly.”

“Not sub-zero chilly.” I start folding the blanket again.

She shrugs, as if to show me that it’s my own fault if I freeze to death during the night.

“He’s not right for you, Tracey.”

“Will?” I sigh. “Ma, how do you know that? You barely know him.”

“I know enough. He’s wrong. He doesn’t make you happy.”

“Vinnie doesn’t make Mary Beth happy. Why should she stay with him?”

“She has a marriage and children.” To my mother, staunch Catholic that she is, that’s reason enough. “Don’t make the same mistake your sister did, Tracey. Marry somebody who loves you.”

“I plan to. Ma—”

She leans closer to me, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Marry somebody who loves you more than you want him to. Marry someone who loves you more than you love him. Because he’ll always treat you like a queen. He’ll always be there. And you’ll learn to love him back.”

What kind of advice is that?

Uh-oh.

I realize, looking at her face, that it’s advice that stems from experience.

“So you…you didn’t love Pop when you married him?” I ask, stunned.

“I loved him. Sure I loved him. But he didn’t make my heart crazy, the way I expected. He was crazy about me, though.” She shakes her head. “Thought I
was the best thing that ever could have happened to him. I could do no wrong.”

“You still can’t.”

She smiles and taps me in the chest. “Now you see.”

I don’t, actually.

But I let her think she’s given me food for thought.

The rest of my visit flies by. We spend Sunday at church, then having a spaghetti dinner at my grandparent’s house at high noon, even though it’s ninety-five degrees out and so humid that everyone’s face is moist and flushed and everyone’s hair is plastered to their head. It’s not a pretty sight. The good thing is, it’s too hot to eat. Meaning, I’m able to stick to my diet, which I had expected to be a challenge this weekend.

Sunday night we go to see Joey and Sara’s new house, then we go to my Aunt Mary’s for coffee and homemade pizzelle. All of us. The whole family. I never noticed before that in Brookside, everyone travels in packs.

I don’t have a minute to myself until I’m on the bus headed back to the city on Monday afternoon. It’s a humid, gray day—the crappiest Independence day weather I can remember in years. That should make it easier to spend the entire day on a crowded bus, but somehow, it doesn’t.

I didn’t realize, until I was onboard, that this is a local. It’s going to take a full twelve hours to get back
to Manhattan, with stops in every godforsaken rundown industrial town across the state.

Utica, Rome…they all look the same. Nothing to see, no reason to get off the bus for the five minutes we’re stopped—unless it’s to smoke. Which I do, until I realize I’d better conserve the few cigarettes I have left.

When we have an extended stop in Albany, I realize that I’m less than an hour away from Will. If I switched buses in this terminal, I would be in North Mannfield before this bus had even covered half the distance between here and the city.

But I can’t do that.

I can’t just show up on Will’s doorstep—does the cast house have a doorstep?—and demand to see him.

So I smoke my third-to-last cigarette and my second-to-last cigarette and I get back on the bus when the driver announces that it’s leaving.

Somewhere around Poughkeepsie, I finish reading Henry Fielding’s
Tom Jones,
which I’ve been working on for two weeks and which was surprisingly entertaining. I move on to
Moby Dick,
the only other reading material I have with me. When I bought it back in New York, I promised myself that if I can get through this one, I can read the new Danielle Steel just to give my brain a rest.

I’m grateful when, after only a few pages, it becomes too dark for reading and the light over my seat doesn’t work. I put the book aside and am perfectly content to stare out the window.

There aren’t as many lowlifes on the bus now that we’re almost to the city. There are lots of college students, and old ladies, and single mothers with young kids.

Traffic grows heavier as we head down through Jersey.

By the time we’ve reached the George Washington Bridge, we’re in a full-fledged traffic jam. We inch onto the bridge. Inch by inch.

I’m starting to feel trapped.

The bus is getting hot.

The driver announces that there’s a problem with the A.C. and he’s had to turn it down a notch so we don’t stall out on the bridge.

Sweat is trickling down my head.

The old man next to me is snoring.

The little kid in back of me is rhythmically kicking my seat.

The college kids in the back are playing rap music with a grinding beat.

My heart is starting to pound.

If only I could smoke.

But there’s no smoking allowed.

I need a distraction, so I try to think about something else.

Will.

But when I think about Will, I realize that he’s probably having a fabulous Fourth of July. He’s probably under the stars, on a beach by the lake, with all his new friends.

The bus is creeping across the outer lane of the bridge.

There’s an explosion.

I shriek.

The old man wakes up sputtering.

The kid behind me is screeching.

“It’s just fireworks!” his mother keeps saying.

I look out the window, and she’s right.

There are fireworks over the city.

But I find myself wincing at every boom, wondering if it’s my imagination or if the bridge is shaking every time there’s a brilliant flash in the sky.

For a split second, I thought the first explosion was a bomb. Now that I know it’s just fireworks, I find myself wondering what would happen if there really was a bomb. With New York City a prime terrorist target, it isn’t far-fetched that some evil mind has considered blowing up the George Washington Bridge on the Fourth of July.

The bus is right up against the railing, and we’re not going anywhere.

If a bomb went off at this very moment, we would pitch over the railing into the Hudson River.

We would drown.

We would die.

I’m sweating profusely, but it’s a cold, clammy sweat, and I’m having a hard time swallowing. It gets worse when I think about it—the mechanics of swallowing, I mean.

Oh my God.

My throat is closing and I can’t breathe and I’m trapped.

And I’m going to die.

I’m careful not to look out the window.

If I look out the window and see the railing and the river, I’m going to lose it.

The bus moves forward another fraction of an inch.

I feel like it’s teetering on the edge of the bridge.

I glance at the other passengers to see if anyone else realizes how precarious our predicament really is, but everyone seems to be unfazed.

Then again, I probably look unfazed, too.

It’s not as though I’ve hurtled myself into the aisle in a Nino-style frenzy.

Yet.

We move forward.

Inch by inch.

Hour by hour.

The fireworks finale erupts overhead in a dazzling commotion of flashing lights and smoke and sound.

I clasp my hands in my lap so tightly that my index fingernail on one hand draws blood from the palm of the other hand.

Finally, mercifully, we’re off the bridge.

As the bus makes its way through the clogged west side traffic, I find myself calming down gradually.

By the time we make it to the Port Authority, my heart rate is almost back to normal.