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Smiling, Gia woke her phone up. Jane’s photo was of a beautiful coastal town, all the buildings of golden stone topped with red tile roofs. A tall steeple rose from the middle of town. The setting sun behind it was like a halo.
Jane was an excellent photographer.
Istria. Jealous? was her caption.
This was a bit with them, a riff on an old app where users posted a photo of whatever they were doing when prompted a couple times a day. The app was intended to show people as they really were, with all the artifice of social media stripped away.
Gia and her friends did something like it in their regular chat. It had started as a joke, when Kathie posted a photo of her freshly leased East Village ‘apartment’ (a glorified closet with a communal bathroom in the hallway), which made Gia’s tiny house look like a castle. She’d posted a photo of her teensy, stained sink and her teensy, two-burner cooktop with the caption, East Village. Jealous? Everybody had responded with photos of their own, and a bit was born.
Right from the start, that very first, out-of-the-blue exchange of photos, had brought them all back together despite the miles that stretched between them. Moreover, it had put those often ambivalent, usually complicated events of new adulthood—the first apartment that didn’t measure up to one’s teenage fantasies, the first career-oriented job that was nowhere near as glamorous as one had imagined, the funky old car that had been quirky when Mom and Dad paid for the repairs but was now an albatross—into context and reminded them that they were all going through it together, and it didn’t matter that whole countries separated them now.
Gia took a photo of her bulletin board, focusing on Sonny Barger and his irreverent tongue. Signal Bend, she wrote. Jealous?
Aura posted a photo of her lap, in what appeared to be a black pencil skirt, sitting in what was obviously a high-end limo. Brussels. You jealous?
Kathie was last in, showing a messily chic design board, with bright fabrics, threads, a long white measuring tape, and the humongous scissors designers used. Hell’s Kitchen. Jealous?
The tradition was to let those photos and their terse, wry captions stand for the whole exchange, but today, Gia felt like it wasn’t enough. She needed more.
An unpleasant feeling bloomed in her chest—the same feeling, or close enough to it, that unfurled when she tried to examine her feelings about this tiny house (she was trying not to think of it as the ‘castoff shed’ anymore). That was strange; she had no ambivalent feelings about these women she loved, no resentments or irritations that simmered under the surface, no sincere jealousies. Her friends made her feel better, not worse. So why did she feel worse?
Scrolling through this latest exchange, she studied the photos again. Jane: on assignment in Croatia, doing a story on the recent implosion of the hard-right political party there. Aura: Brussels, on the job, being an in-the-room aide to a US ambassador. Kathie: designing clothes that will drape Wilhelmina models on runways during the next Fashion Week.
And Gia, at her desk in Signal Bend.
That was it. She was feeling something like jealousy—or no, maybe not that. But like she wasn’t measuring up to the others.
And that was blazingly stupid. She measured up just fine to the others. She was ABD—All But Dissertation—only that single project away from a PhD. Already she had more education than any of her friends, not that it was a competition. Besides, she hadn’t come home in defeat; she’d come home so she could focus on her research without worrying about the minutiae of daily life—no bills to pay, no mundane errands to run, no distractions at all.
When her diss was finished and her degree conferred, she’d go on the job market and find a tenure-track position somewhere. She’d be Dr. Gia Lunden, Professor of Anthropology. She was doing exactly what she wanted to be doing, and that itself was a significant privilege. What the fuck was her problem lately?
Feeling bad for feeling bad, Gia added a text to the chat. Love you dorks ??????
A whole storm of hearts, sent from around the world, followed.
~oOo~
Still stewing in her weird feelings about where she was in relation to where her friends were, by the time Gia had her desk area arranged and ready, she’d lost the motivation to work. For nearly half an hour she sat there, staring at her notes but not reading them, or looking at the blank whiteness on her screen but not typing even one letter. It wasn’t that she was distracted by something else; she wasn’t obsessing about her friends, or about the weirdness of this homecoming, or even about Zaxxon Bello ghosting her after an earthshattering night together (she would not allow him one square millimeter of her brain space; he could fuck all the way off forever).
Her brain simply would not focus anywhere.
That wasn’t normal for her. Usually, her brain went five hundred miles an hour, dragging dozens of thoughts around and shifting focus constantly to whatever was most important at that moment. Now it was all a hazy muddle, and it made her temples throb.
Faintly, the sound of a power tool wafted through her open window. She recognized it at once as one of Bo’s wood saws. He was working. Dad was on a club job, so she knew it was Bo in the woodshop, working alone.
Gia loved to watch her brother work. He was so methodical, so precise, and so completely absorbed. To watch him craft something, be it a knickknack he’d sell at an arts and crafts fair or a special-order piece of furniture, was to see him in love. Bo in love was a wonder. He was completely calm and focused, and every move he made, every touch of the material or the tools of his art, was gentle and reverent. The workshop was his element; the world in which he fit perfectly.
She hadn’t watched him work for a long time. More than a year. She closed her laptop, closed her notebooks, and set aside her own work for later.
~oOo~
Bo didn’t mind people watching him work—he was proud of his talent and skill—but he did not like to be interrupted. He’d answer questions while he worked, in fact he enjoyed explaining what he was doing and why, but he didn’t like to have to stop.
Thus, he didn’t want people to knock at the woodshop door. In the house, he’d be upset if someone barged into his room unannounced, but in the shop, he wanted people to come straight in and take a seat.
Gia sat at the far corner of the main worktable. Otto sat on the floor at her side, leaning against her leg while she scratched his ear.
Bo wasn’t using the table saw now; he’d cut a long, sweeping piece of a beautiful reddish wood with a dense, dark grain and was carving on it with a chisel and a gouge, pausing after each pass for a long, caressing wipe of a soft cloth over the wood, then finding the next perfect spot to carve. Pinned to the bulletin board on the side wall was the sketch he’d made of this custom piece, and every now and then he glanced up at it, using it to decide where to make each groove. He never drew on the wood to guide his work; it was all freehand.
