shuts with an airtight seal. Everything is quiet in our little bubble.
“Am I really doing this?”
“Yes, you are. Do you have the keys?”
I reach through the seats into my coat pocket, producing the yellow floaty from which dangles the beach house key.
“Let’s do it!” She pushes a button to start the engine. On the dashboard, a big control screen lights up. I’ve never been inside a car this nice, let alone taken a road trip. I bet it has power steering and brakes that work too.
“I feel like I’m abandoning ship.”
“You need a vacation, Beth. This is gonna be great.”
As we roar down the street, I watch my little house disappear in the side-view mirror. Remember: you’re traveling light, leaving the baggage behind. No shed, no weed, no St. Rick staring at you in your sleep. No guilt about leaving either. No pseudo-nuns slapping you down just for trying to help. No big church with big screens. No mirrors with strangers looking back at you, strangers who used to be you.
Ahead of you, there’s a long strip of sand and a blue-green infinity, crashing waves that come not from a sleep machine but from the actual crash of actual waves. Sun on skin and long hours of doing absolutely nothing. Two women who are lonely in their marriages but not alone, escaping from the world that won’t give them everything and won’t let them feel content with what they have.
“Wait,” I say. “I forgot my swimsuit.”
“Seriously? Never mind. We’ll take care of it along the way.”
Fifteen hours is a lot of time on the road. An hour to D.C., just settling in. Two more hours to Richmond, where we stop for lunch and end up talking about Jim and Kathie Shaw, and what it would be like if Rick did take the job and we moved down here. “You claim you’d keep in touch,” Holly says, “but the Shaws said exactly the same thing.” We hit the outlet mall on the highway for a swimsuit. Resisting Holly’s peer pressure, I go with a one-piece. More resistance: I refuse to try it on and model for her. Not my thing.
Somewhere in North Carolina, six hours in, things take a turn for the silly. Holly confesses to having a crush on the Archbishop of Canterbury.
“Ever since the Royal Wedding,” she says. “That voice. Those eyebrows.”
“You do have a thing for older men.”
Say what you want about air travel. There’s something liberating about the open road, whether you experience it by bus, by ancient Volkswagen, or riding shotgun in the übercool car of the future. Midafternoon in Fayetteville, North Carolina: Holly stops for gas and pushes the magic button that folds the convertible top away. For nearly an hour, we blast eighties music and let the wind whip our hair—mine practically blinding me when I don’t hold the tangles back, Holly’s so short it can barely tickle her cheek. By the time we reach the state line, the wind has battered us into temporary submission. She puts the top up and in the silence that follows, we both look at each other like we’re nineteen again.
“This is fun,” I say.
“What did I tell you?”
Stacy’s beach house lies on the Atlantic coast of Florida somewhere between Jacksonville and St. Augustine. The GPS screen on the dashboard counts down the miles, updating our time of arrival, ensuring that during every moment of the journey we have a sense of forward progress.
Through South Carolina, we rehash the events of the past month, with Holly telling me once again how sorry she is about the results of Eric’s investigation into Mission Up.
“It’s the kind of thing we should be doing,” she says by way of encouragement. “We’re always sending people on short-term mission trips halfway around the globe, taking up collections to sink wells in Africa, and right on our doorstep, right under our very noses . . .” She throws her hands up, stumped by the inexpressible depth of need all around us. “Not that those things aren’t important. I know they are. But what does it say about us that trouble abroad elicits our sympathy while trouble at home just makes us want to lock our doors?”
Not knowing how to answer, I somehow find myself telling her about Miss Hannah, something I’ve never done before.
“She spent most of her life halfway around the globe,” I say, “but for her, it wasn’t about the distance as much as just doing something.”
“Was she a medical missionary?” Holly