away to college. His next chance had come a year later, when Connie followed him east to Morton College, in Morton’s Glen, Virginia. Her move did put her within an easy drive of Charlottesville in Jonathan’s Land Cruiser (which Jonathan, approving of Connie, let Joey borrow), but it also set her on course to be a normal college student and develop an independent life. After his second visit to Morton, which the two of them mostly spent dodging her Korean roommate, Joey proposed that, for her sake (since she didn’t seem to be adapting well to college), they again try to break their dependency and cease communication for a while. His proposal wasn’t entirely disingenuous; he wasn’t entirely ruling out a future for them. But he’d been doing a lot of listening to Jenna and was hoping to spend his winter break with her and Jonathan in McLean. When Connie finally got wind of these plans, a few weeks before Christmas, he asked her if she didn’t want to go home to St. Paul and see her friends and family (i.e., the way a normal college freshman might). “No,” she said, “I want to be with you.” Spurred by the prospect of Jenna, and bolstered by an especially satisfying hookup that had fallen in his lap at a recent semi-formal dance, he took a hard line with Connie, who then cried on the phone so stormily that she got the hiccups. She said she never wanted to go home again, never wanted to spend another night with Carol and the babies. But Joey made her do it anyway. And even though he barely spoke to Jenna over the holidays—first she was skiing, then she was in New York with Nick—he continued to pursue his exit strategy until the night in early February when Carol called him with the news that Connie had dropped out of Morton and was back on Barrier Street, more seriously depressed than ever.
Connie had apparently aced two of her December finals at Morton but simply failed to show up for the other two, and there was virulent antipathy between her and the roommate, who listened to the Backstreet Boys so loudly that the treble leaking from her earphones would have driven anybody crazy, and left her TV tuned to a shopping channel all day, and taunted Connie about her “stuck-up” boyfriend, and invited her to imagine all the stuck-up sluts that he was screwing behind her back, and smelled up their room with terrible pickles. Connie had returned to school in January on academic probation but proceeded to spend so much time in bed that the campus health service finally intervened and sent her home. All this Carol reported to Joey with sober worry and a welcome absence of recrimination.
That he’d passed up this latest fine chance to free himself of Connie (who could no longer pretend that her depression was just a figment of Carol’s imagination) was somewhat related to the recent bitter news of Jenna’s “sort-of” engagement to Nick, but only somewhat. Although Joey knew enough to be afraid of hard-core mental illness, it seemed to him that if he eliminated from his pool of prospects every interesting college-age girl with some history of depression, he would be left with a very small pool indeed. And Connie had reason to be depressed: her roommate was intolerable and she’d been dying of loneliness. When Carol put her on the telephone, she used the word “sorry” a hundred times. Sorry to have let Joey down, sorry not to have been stronger, sorry to distract him from his schoolwork, sorry to have wasted her tuition money, sorry to be a burden to Carol, sorry to be a burden to everyone, sorry to be such a drag to talk to. Although (or because) she was too low to ask anything of him—seemed finally halfway willing to let go of him—he told her he was flush with cash from his mother and would fly out to see her. The more she said he didn’t have to do this, the more he knew he did.
The week he’d then spent on Barrier Street had been the first truly adult week of his life. Sitting with Blake in the great-room, the dimensions of which were more modest than he remembered, he watched Fox News’s coverage of the assault on Baghdad and felt his long-standing resentment of 9/11 beginning to dissolve. The country was finally moving on, finally taking history in its hands