prep

Martha’s Vineyard in the middle of April is like showing up for an extremely fancy party three hours early. “Let me know if you want a late checkout,” the hotel clerk said, pointing down a hallway cluttered with unused patio furniture in the direction of our room. “There’s literally nobody else here.” The deserted streets suggested a luxurious apocalypse. It took us three tries to find an open coffee shop.

Tom had a work thing so I tagged along for the night, walking Avon down the immaculately empty sidewalks and finishing my daily word count in the corner of a tiny hotel pub playing local news above the bar. I’m trying to do things like this now, to take advantage of the fact that I set my own schedule–to get over the inherent anxious weirdness of all this freedom, to see a movie on a weekday afternoon. This is your dream, asshole, I am constantly reminding myself. Enjoy it. Sometimes I’m better at remembering than others.

Last week I did reasonably well, curled in the passenger seat of Tom’s Jeep reading library books and listening to the Guster-and-DMB stylings of MVY radio, watching construction workers attach new cedar shingles to sprawling beach houses and delivery men unload pallets of nonperishables for Memorial Day weekend. All of our deadlines looming; all of us hard at work.