“Ah. I get it. Well, we can make it work either way. And I know you want to leave the second floor as-is for now, but I was thinking those small rooms would only need some fresh paint and you could rent them out as massage rooms, or something like that.”
He wasn’t wrong. The second floor of my building contained a kitchen, a large room I was planning to use as an office, and two little rooms I’d vaguely thought I might someday combine into a small studio I could use for private lessons.
“Anyway, that would be an easy fix,” Justin said. “You can keep it in mind. We still good to walk through together on August fifteenth?”
When I first hatched the idea to buy a new place and expand my offerings, I’d been filled with excitement. Just a month ago, when I was describing it to the loan officer at the bank, he’d remarked that my enthusiasm was palpable.
Now I was filled with… I wasn’t even sure. Trepidation, in part. But to be fair, that was probably a logical response to asbestos.
Justin had turned the phone back around and was awaiting my response.
“Yes,” I said. “The fifteenth.”
“I’ll bring some flooring samples now that I have a sense of the space,” Justin said.
“With all the store junk gone, you can really imagine the new studio here,” said Rory, who’d been with me and my Realtor on my initial viewing.
You really could. I could picture it perfectly: the new studio. My future.
I wanted to sign off. I wanted to go for another swim, though I’d only been out of the water for a couple hours. Or maybe I could round up some people for a campfire. I wanted to get out of this limbo, was the point, this spot where I was half in one world and half in another.
But Rory wouldn’t let me. “Don’t mothball your phone yet. I’m going to call you from my car. Stand by.”
I sighed and waited for the incoming call. I tried to get back into my fun BFF groove. “Yes?” I said, making a silly face when I picked up the FaceTime.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“What do you mean?”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Nothing’s wrong with me!”
“You didn’t seem very excited.”
“I guess it’s hard through a phone screen. You probably need to see it in context to really appreciate it.”
There was that word again, Teddy’s word:context.
“Well,” Rory said, “it looks amazing. Now that it’s empty, it’s so much bigger than I realized.” She shot me another weird look. “So you’re liking it there? You must be if you’ve completely abandoned your phone. I have to say, I thought you were going to be calling me constantly, fretting over the new studio—and the existing one.”
“I thought I would, too, but I don’t know, I guess I really embraced the challenge of immersing myself here.”
“‘Here’ being camp? The woods? The dance stuff you’re doing?”
Good question. “All of the above,” I said, because I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to get back to it. To “here,” whatever it was.
It did occur to me that maybe the pull I was feeling wasn’ttoanything—to the woods, or to Wild Arts, or toLittle Women, butaway. From Miss Miller’s of Minnetonka. From my new building. From my life.
But that wasn’t a possibility.
“Anyway,” I said, “I knew you’d call the camp if you ran into any trouble, so I’ve been assuming everything is fine.”
“Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine.”
“And how’s the chicken nugget?”
“Chicken nugget” is what we called her baby-to-be.
