Let It Snow(97)

It’s 8:30 a.m. on Thursday morning, she thought, repeating the mental math to herself. My return flight to California is at 7:00 p.m. Sunday night. All I have to do is get through the next four days—preferably without having a nervous breakdown!—and then I can wing my way back to my lovely, safe, predictable life in San Francisco.

Let the countdown begin.

Katie breathed out a long sigh as she pulled back onto the highway. She needed get her head on straight and pull it together. Facts, that was what she needed to focus on. Facts had always comforted Katie.

Fact: she wasn’t a teenager anymore. Fact: she was an adult. Fact: she could handle this.

It had been ten long years since Katie Marie Lawson had set foot in Harper’s Crossing, the town of her childhood and her youth. She had never meant to stay away this long.

When she originally left to California for school a decade ago, her plan had been to come back at Christmastime. Sitting at L.A.X., waiting for her flight that first holiday away from home had been her first experience with a bout of hyperventilation. She never got on the plane. The next episode occurred as she merely booked her flight that same year for spring break. That time she hadn’t even made it to the airport. It took several years to get the episodes under control, during which she refrained from making any travel plans.

Then, after she graduated from law school at Pepperdine University, she immediately started working at Wilson, Martin, Gregory, and Assoc., a very prestigious law firm in San Francisco.

The first three years at the firm flew by in a blur. Katie worked 80+ hours a week and even worked every holiday, including Christmas. She’d barely had time to breathe, let alone go out of town.

Last year, even though she was on the fast track to make Junior Partner, she had taken a vacation. The plan had been to take a few days for herself—to decompress—and then head back to her hometown. She had booked her flight and the experience had been incident free.

That was progress at least.

Katie had then spent the first four days of her vacation in her apartment, so it was really more of a ‘staycation’—but still. She cleaned, cooked, slept, and had a Julia Roberts movie marathon.

At the end of the four days, the morning she was scheduled to fly back to Illinois, she had been called into work because a fellow associate had come down with the flu. And well, if she was being honest, she had been more than happy to go back to work on Wednesday instead of being on a direct flight from SFO to O’Hare.

But, she was here now. In Illinois. Headed back to Harper’s Crossing. She had done it. Because this weekend wasn’t about her—it was about Miss Sophie Hunter, who was getting married to Bobby Sloan, Jr., the youngest of the five Sloan boys. Sophie had called her, ecstatic, three months earlier to announce her engagement to Bobby and to ask Katie to be her maid of honor.

Sophie (or ‘Sophiebell,’ which had been her nickname since Sophie was six and had decided that she was Tinker Bell) was the closest thing Katie had to a sister. And there was nothing Katie wouldn’t do for her. Other than a brief trip out to California after Sophie had graduated high school four years ago, Katie hadn’t seen her since she left home. But they always talked or e-mailed several times a week.

Katie was an only child. She and her mom, Pam, had gone to live with her Aunt Wendy in Harper’s Crossing when Katie was four, immediately after her parents’ divorce.

Craig, Katie’s dad, had come to visit his daughter exactly one time since she’d moved to Harper’s Crossing. It was one month after she and her mom had arrived that Craig had taken Katie to Tasty Treats for a double scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

He had talked about how much he loved her and assured her that the divorce and the move had nothing to do with her. He had also promised to see her once a month. Suffice it to say, he didn’t keep that promise.

Katie had not seen her father since that cold October Saturday twenty-four years ago.

Growing up, she’d always just assumed that he had stayed away because he and Aunt Wendy “did not see eye to eye,” as Katie’s mom always said (although, now, as an adult, she was leaning toward the theory that it was because he was a shitheel).

Honestly, if Katie’s memory served, she hadn’t really seen a lot of her dad even when he and her mom were still together. It seemed to Katie that ‘pre-divorce’ it was just Katie and her mom and then ‘post-divorce’ it was Katie, her mom, and Aunt Wendy.

She never really missed her dad. Sometimes she would miss her idea of what having a dad in her life would be like. But never the man who had fathered her. She really never knew that man, and what she had known had been unpredictable. Promising to come visit her once a month and then her never seeing hide nor hair of him again really just seemed par for the course where he was concerned. It was just the last in a long line of broken promises that had characterized their father-daughter relationship, and—even at four years old—Katie didn’t remember being terribly surprised when the months rolled around and he didn’t.