one nervous college student left standing at the carousel, her fraying red bag tumbled down the ramp. Relief made her light-headed, like helium filling her skull.
Outside, she scanned the congested arrivals area for her aunt. The lanes were a mess of honking cars, panicked drivers bent double over their steering wheels as they searched the sidewalk for their loved ones. She finally spotted Louise waving from behind the windshield of a recently waxed Volvo. Louise parked the car in the middle lane and leaped out to hug Kate, which earned her a few sharp tweets on the traffic marshal’s whistle. Louise ignored him. She took Kate’s shoulders in her hands, even though Kate was a good six inches taller than her, and held her away to scrutinize her.
Kate did her own inventory. She hadn’t seen her aunt in three years, but Louise looked exactly the same. Only more tan. Like a deck that had been re-stained to a fresh but unrealistic brown. She was petite—she had a metabolism that could process pig lard into sinewy muscle—with a head of tight, tiny curls that always looked just a little wet. Louise was a harder, shinier version of Kate’s mother, a version that had been dipped in enamel and set out to dry. Kate remembered Louise as nosy and annoying, but she hoped that her aunt had changed, or that she herself had grown more patient, or that she had simply misremembered.
At last Louise dropped her hands and declared, “You look exhausted.”
Kate managed a smile. “It’s been a long day.”
“I bet! Three connections! You should have booked a direct flight.” Louise grabbed the suitcase and, over Kate’s protests, started wrestling it into the trunk. “I have an under-eye cream you can use. It’ll take away the circles. And did you eat? We have plenty of food waiting at home. Oh—I should call Frank, remind him to defrost the steak.”
If Louise was a renovated deck, Kate was a plaster wall under demolition. Pieces of herself were falling off in the balmy California air. “I can text him from the road if you want.”
“Oh, yes.” Louise nodded, as if Kate were reminding her about a city she had visited a long time ago. “Texting.”
Louise chattered all the way through San Francisco’s endless loops of overpasses and underpasses, gushing words like a sprung fire hydrant. She told Kate how they had prepared the guest room, how excited they were to have her, how she had planned out all kinds of activities. They crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin, the turnoff to Sausalito, a sign for Tiburon, and still Louise talked.
Kate tried to listen, but the words floated over her without touching down. She rested her head against the window and watched the surroundings through half-closed eyes. Up here, the light was rich and liquid, more golden than down near the airport; it pooled on the huge houses in the hills, the boats in the marina. People must pay a lot of money to live in that light.
“By the way,” Louise said as they took a steep exit, “I saved last week’s Atlantic for you. There’s an article I thought you should read.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s all about how your generation is feeling very lost. Something to do with the brain chemicals released when you look at television screens. Also, the economy. But by the end, the guy they profiled was feeling much better. He had realized he needed to go to law school. It helps a lot when you discover the right thing, you know?”
Kate’s eyes slid over to her aunt. “Yep,” she said.
She knew the article Louise meant. It had been everywhere. For a couple days, the internet had been full of memes and think pieces about the trite quotes and obviously staged photos. Her college friends had pilloried it by group text. Or at least the people in the group with good jobs had pilloried it. The others, the ones like Kate, stayed silent.
“Your job just wasn’t the right fit,” Louise continued. “It wasn’t your passion. Otherwise you wouldn’t have … well. My point is, your feelings are perfectly normal.”
“Thanks,” Kate said.
“And law school is always an option.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, you would have to take the LSAT. I think Faye’s son took it, if you want to borrow his books while you’re here.”
She means well, Kate told herself. That was her family’s private saying about Louise. She means well. They had used it that time when Louise lectured a recovering alcoholic cousin about the importance of