The Road Back to Larkspur Street
The mail had been sitting on Lila's kitchen counter for six days, a small mountain of envelopes she couldn't bring herself to open. Bills, mostly. A postcard from a college friend now living in Portugal, all sunburned optimism and exclamation points. And underneath everything, unopened for going on three weeks, a card in handwriting she recognized immediately and had chosen, deliberately, to ignore.
She stood at the counter that Tuesday evening in her sock feet, sorting the pile into stacks that meant nothing—important, unimportant, deal with later—when really she was just moving paper from one place to another so she wouldn't have to think. The apartment was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the traffic bleeding up from the street eleven floors below. She liked it that way. Quiet. Contained. A life she had built with her own hands, far from anything that might ask something of her she wasn't prepared to give.
The phone rang at 7:42. She knew the time because she glanced at the microwave clock the way she always did when something interrupted her evening, some small animal instinct toward orientation, toward knowing exactly where she stood in time before the world…
