“Did I buy these or did you?” A few days later, Heath stood in our kitchen holding a set of drinking glasses edged with blue and orange wavy lines, one in each hand. I stood facing him, packing tape gun in hand, in preparation to seal up one of the boxes I’d just filled.
“I bought them but you can keep them. I’m going to get a new set when I buy my condo.” Without a word, my brawny, six-foot-five roommate replaced the glasses in the cupboard by the sink.
“Oooh, while you’re here, I could use your height to grab me some of that crap on the top shelf.”
He opened the next cupboard and cocked his head. “Way up there? How the hell did you get it up there in the first place?”
I shrugged. “You, probably. That mini food processor and the juicer are mine.”
“There go my plans to start the new cleanse diet.” He pulled the seldomly-used appliances down, dutifully wrapping the cords around them to prepare for packing.
“Like you needed an excuse,” I replied without mentioning that I’d purchased and then used them exactly three times for that exact purpose. Then I thanked him and tucked the appliances into the next empty box.
Heath squinted as he watched me. “Just…uh… how much of your stuff are you moving over there?”
I darted a quick glance at him before grabbing the marker to label in great detail the contents of the box I’d just sealed up. “All of it.”
He frowned. “But you’ve got the interview soon and if all goes well, it should only be a few months at most for your green card to go through. Do you really need to go through all this? Why not just pack up a few of your clothes and toiletries?”
I bit my lip, capping the pen, squeezing it tight, so it made a satisfying click. “Aside from it looking really suspicious to my movers that I’m only taking a couple boxes, you mean? It can’t just look like I’m over there as a guest or as a temporary hook-up.”
“Yeah but… who’s looking?”
“Well Mia insisted on helping me move all my stuff over. And Adam got involved and… well you understand I have to make it look real.” I hesitated, then crossed to check the rest of the cupboards. Meanwhile, Heath had plopped himself down at the kitchen table and was running his long fingers through his dark blond hair.
“Are you that depressed that I’m going?” I asked. “I would have thought you’d be jumping for joy that you can turn this place back into your wanton love pad.”
Heath cast an acidic eye in my direction, so very opposite of amused by my joke. In fact, he’d been quite the hermit, lately, not dating much at all. The previous week, I’d convinced him to set up a profile on a new dating app just for shits and giggles. Nothing had come of it yet. But it was still early days, as I reminded him daily.
At least nowadays he was hanging out with friends again and he wasn’t as morose as he’d been the previous year while recovering from a bad breakup.
Heath cast an assessing look over the small cluster of boxes. “You know, for having lived here for, what, a year and a half, you really don’t have that much stuff.”
I smiled. “I showed up from Canada with just a suitcase of clothes and haven’t been back. I have much more crap back home but I haven’t missed it.”
Heath tilted his head at me. “I never hear you talk about home, ever. Don’t you miss it at all?”
I hesitated, setting down a white mug imprinted with the logo of a popular bug-logging software. It had been free swag at the last training conference I’d attended. I pondered Heath’s question. Home. It had been a long time since I’d thought about the place I left behind as home. Sure, I’d grown up there and my parents’ house was there but….
I missed Canada, to be sure. BC and California were so close culturally that the differences were minimal—one place used metric while the other used the old school system. One placed loved baseball and basketball while the other worshipped at the altar of the Stanley Cup and all things hockey. One place rained a lot more than the other, but had gorgeous green vistas and mountains to show for it. Both had equally sucktastic traffic.