By the end of Katie’s second week back in Florida, she and Maya had settled into a routine that offered a much gentler pace than she’d had in New York.
In the morning, she’d sit and watch the sun and the seagulls as Maya surfed, and then they’d do a yoga routine together on the beach. Back at the bungalow, Maya would whip up a smoothie or an egg-white omelet for the two of them, and then they’d head to the surf shop, where Katie took meticulous notes on all she would need to know to run the shop in Maya’s absence.
Then, once they closed the shop for the day, they’d head over to check out the progress at the new building. The more details Maya shared about the project, the more excited Katie became, and she looked forward to seeing the changes in the space each day.
Evenings involved either dinner somewhere near the water so they could hear the waves coming in, or Maya would cook something for the two of them and then they’d go and walk along the shore.
Katie slowly began to relax.
The past few years had been non-stop stress with long hours and never-ending demands at work and a lonely dissatisfaction at home. Breakfast had consisted of a muffin or a granola bar on the run. Terrance frowned upon anyone taking a lunch break, so she’d grab something from the vending machine and eat it at her desk. Dinner always ended up being a frozen meal or takeout she picked up on the way home, where she’d collapse on the sofa exhausted. Her only escape had been reading, which she stayed up much too late doing, resulting in a rushed, tired morning as the cycle repeated itself over and over again.
In comparison, life with Maya seemed like a vacation, and though Katie was nervous about managing the store alone during Maya’s cruise, she couldn’t help but notice how much calmer she felt. How much more at peace she was, even after such a short period of time.
Still, uncertainty about the future was ever-present in her mind, and there were times—usually after she got off the phone with her mom—that the worry threatened to consume her.
“You can’t let her get to you,” Maya said after Katie had finished a particularly difficult conversation with their mother.
“She’s right though.” Katie sighed as she swept the construction dust from the floor in the new building. “I have no plan beyond the next month when you return from your cruise. I haven’t sent out a single resume. I haven’t even looked at a job listing. It’s like I’ve just stuck my head in the sand and disengaged from reality.”
“It’s been two weeks!” Maya said as she carried a ladder over to where the paper in the window was beginning to fall. “It’s fine to just take some time off, Kate. You’ve got money coming in from the severance package and your bills are minimal, so it’s not like you’re on the verge of being destitute. And I know working for me isn’t your dream job or your long-term solution, but you can stay here as long as you want. Until you decide what’s next, anyway.”
“And what if I have no idea what comes next? What if everything I thought I wanted suddenly doesn’t make sense anymore, and I don’t know what I want to be now that I’m all grown up?”
“Then, you don’t make any decisions until you know.” She positioned the ladder under the window and shoved her fist through the roll of tape so it encircled her arm like a bracelet, leaving her hand free to hold onto the ladder as she climbed. “Don’t obsess over the future so much. That fearful energy blocks the possibilities the universe is trying to send you. You need to learn to be in the moment and find the good in where you’re at. Be present. Be grateful. Then, once you take the pressure off, you’ll find it easier to figure out what you want to do next.”
“That’s so easy for you to say. You’ve always lived that way. I haven’t! My entire life has been spent focusing on what comes next. When I was in middle school, I was focused on high school. When I was in high school, I was worried about college. Since college, I’ve been trying to move up at work and worrying about what would happen when Grant came back. I don’t know how to be in the present, Maya. I’ve always lived for what tomorrow would bring, and now tomorrow is completely unclear, and I don’t know what to live for.”
“Live for you! That’s it. It’s that simple. Do what makes you happy. Do what makes you feel good. Have you felt good the last six years? Have you been happy? Because it sure didn’t seem like it from here.”
“You don’t understand.” Katie shook her head in frustration and bent to hold the dustpan while she swept the pile into it. “We’re wired differently, okay? We always have been.”
“Maybe so, but being happy is a choice anyone can make.” Maya stretched as far as she could, leaning precariously over the side of the ladder to secure the corner of the paper to the wall. “You have to choose it every day, though. Sometimes every hour. And it can be all around you, but you won’t know it if you spend all your time chasing some future version of what you think being happy should be.”
Katie stood upright and put her hand on her hip. “Some of us like to have a plan in place, okay? We can’t all live with our heads in the clouds trying to channel the right energy like we’re on a perpetual vacation.”
“That’s what you think of my life?” Maya turned to look back at her sister as she climbed back down the ladder, but in her distracted state, she missed the bottom step. Her foot hit the ground at an awkward angle, rolling her ankle to the side beneath the force of impact. Collapsing to her knees with a cry of pain, she rolled to her side, clutching the injured foot.
“Maya!” Katie yelled, tossing the broom aside as she rushed to her sister’s side. “Are you okay?”
Maya sucked in a sharp breath with another yelp of pain. “I think my ankle might be broken,” she gritted out through clenched teeth. “Maybe my foot, too.”
“What can I do?” Katie knelt beside Maya. “We have to get you to a hospital. Should I call an ambulance?”
“No. I’m not dying. You can drive my car. My keys are in my pocket.”
“How will we get you to the car, though? You shouldn’t put any weight on it. And I haven’t driven a car in years. We should just call—”
“I’m not calling an ambulance and pulling them away from life-threatening emergencies for a broken ankle. Now, for the love of God, Kate, please just help me get to the car and then get me to a hospital before I pass out from the pain.”
“Two months,” Maya said with a groan as they waited for her to be discharged from the hospital. “I can’t believe I’m not allowed to put any weight on my foot for two whole months. No surfing. No running. No dancing. Two months! They can’t be serious.”
Katie frowned with a lifted brow. “You broke your ankle in two places and had to have a pin put in it. That’s pretty serious. Did you honestly think you’d be back to running right away?”
“No, but when I broke my foot before while I was skateboarding, they just put me in a boot and had me use crutches for a week.”
“That was a contusion, which you reinjured, plus the addition of what the doctor said was a very nasty break in your ankle. Much more serious.”
“This will put me so far behind with the renovations.” Maya sighed, shaking her head in frustration and disbelief. “And there goes my cruise.”
“The cruise is still two weeks away,” Katie offered, trying to be the optimistic one but feeling woefully unqualified. She was usually the one receiving the pep talk, not giving it. “The doctor said the next few days recovering from the surgery will be the most painful, so you should feel much better by your sail date. And you’ve got this handy-dandy knee scooter to get around with. I think it’ll be easier than crutches.”
Maya laid her hand on her forehead and closed her eyes. “I can’t go on a cruise with my foot in a boot and my knee propped on that stupid cart. I’d be in everyone’s way, blocking traffic and slowing everything down. No. No way. I have to tell Ben I can’t go.”
“Maybe you could get a wheelchair and use that on the ship.”
Maya opened her eyes and shot Katie a glare. “No. All of our excursions involved some kind of physical activity, which I won’t be able to do now. And knowing Ben and the type of guy he is, he’d insist on staying behind with me, so then he’d miss out, too. No. It’d be better if I didn’t go at all. At least then, he has a chance to have fun.”
It was unsettling to see the always-upbeat Maya in such a negative state. Katie felt desperate to try and pull her sister out of it, but she had no idea what to do.
“Hey! What would you tell me if the situation was reversed? You’d say I had to stay positive. That I need to look for the bright side. There’s got to be a bright side in this somewhere, right? You always say—”
“The bright side is this happened before we left and not on the ship.” Maya closed her eyes again as she massaged her temples. “It is what it is. I need to tell Ben I can’t go. I promised him I’d be there for him, and now I have to let him down.”
“I’m sure he’ll understand, but maybe it won’t come to that. Let’s see how the next couple of days go. You’re probably going to be a whiz on that scooter in no time. Maybe it won’t be so bad.”
“You know, Kate,” she said, opening her eyes to level another glare at Katie, “contrary to popular belief in this family, my head isn’t always in the clouds. I’ve got to deal with reality like everyone else, and right now, the reality is I have to cancel this cruise.”
Guilt shot through Katie as she replayed their conversation from earlier, and she wished she could take back what she’d said just before Maya fell.
“I’m sorry, okay? I never should have said that. I wish I could approach life the way you do. No, really, I do. You’re a helluva lot happier than I am, and more successful too. And yeah, I do think your life is like a perpetual vacation, and I’m actually jealous of it, if I’m being honest. I mean, I know you have bills and problems like everyone else, but your life is pretty great. And mine sucks. It sucked even before I got laid off and dumped and evicted. I mean, it’s pretty telling that out of everything I lost, what I miss most is the apartment, you know?”
Maya managed a half grin. “Do you realize you’ve only mentioned Grant once or twice the whole time you’ve been here? I wondered if that was because you weren’t ready to talk about him or if it meant something deeper.”
“You know, if you had asked me a month ago, I would have told you I was in love with him and I wanted us to have a future together. But now, having had some time to step back and really think about that relationship and see it for what it was…I think I loved the idea of Grant more than I loved the person. I liked that he had traveled all over the world, and that he had this job that seemed important, and he seemed to know something about everything.”
“He was an obnoxious arse who thought he knew way more than he did.”
“I can see that now. And I think I saw it before, but we’d only been going out a few months when he got the London offer, and it gave our relationship this urgency. Like, we had to make a commitment before it was too late.”
“He was going to London, not off to war. You guys weren’t even talking about serious commitments prior to that.”
“I know. But then he needed someone to stay in his apartment while he was gone to take care of his plants, and my lease was ending at my place, and it seemed like it was the right thing to do at the time. Like maybe it was meant to be. Now, I think if he hadn’t left, we probably wouldn’t have stayed together. We had nothing in common. Two people couldn’t be more opposite. And for months now, we barely talked at all. It was like the phone calls and video chats were more of an obligation than something either of us looked forward to.”
“So, why did you stay in it so long?”
Katie stood and walked over to the window to look down at the parking lot. “I’ve thought a lot about that too. I think it just felt nice to be in a relationship, you know? Like, even if he wasn’t here and we weren’t able to do things together, I had a boyfriend. Sort of. And now, I don’t have anyone.”
“You got me, kid! And you don’t have to be in a relationship to be happy. You know that, right? You need to figure out what makes you happy—you, just you. All by yourself. And then, if you find someone you want to spend your time with, and somehow, the two of you are happier together, that’s icing on the cake. But ever don’t stay in it if it doesn’t make your life better. I mean, obviously, everyone’s going to go through challenges, but being in a relationship should never make you make feel lonelier than being alone.”
“I don’t know what kind of pain meds they gave you, but you sound like some wise old sage.”
“I’m this wise all the time. You just haven’t been listening.”
Katie smiled and sat on the edge of Maya’s hospital bed. “I really am sorry I said those things. I love your life, and I love you. And when I grow up, I wanna be more like you and less like me.”