Read Five Days for Free Online Page B

sometimes just a hello. Twice a week there’d always be a phone call. But still no indication that he wanted to spend a weekend at home, or wanted to see me.
    Until . . .
    Bing.
    Staring out at the water from Pemaquid Point, my brain awash with so many thoughts, I dug out my cellphone and found myself reading:
    Hey Mom. Want to finally get out of Dodge this weekend. Thinking maybe we could meet somewhere like Portland. A couple of good movies in town. We could also catch dinner somewhere. You up for this?
    Damn. Damn. Damn. This would have to be the one weekend in literally nine years that I am going out of town. I texted back:
    Hey Ben. Would love to do dinner and a movie Saturday . . . but I have that professional conference this weekend in Boston. I could try to get out of it . . .
    His immediate reply:
    Don’t do that for me.
    My immediate reply:
    It’s just a work thing. But you are more important than that.
    And you never go anywhere – so let’s push the night out to next weekend.
    Now I’m feeling guilty.
    You’re always feeling guilty about something, Mom. Go run away for a few days – and try not to feel bad about it.
    I stared at this last text long and hard. Thinking of a phrase my poor father invoked time and time again whenever considering the limitations he’d placed on his own life:
    Easier said than done.
    And considering my own personal condition, Ben’s admonition genuinely unsettled me. Because the only response that came to mind was:
    Easier said than done.

Three
    . . . YOU NEVER GO anywhere . . .
    Ouch.
    Though I know Ben didn’t mean that comment to hurt it still did. Because it articulated an uncomfortable truth.
    Walking back to my car, putting the key in the ignition, pulling out of the parking lot, the ocean now behind me, I turned left and followed the spindly, narrow road left, knowing it would curve its way past the summer homes now largely empty with autumn edging closer to winter’s dark harshness, before veering right again and ascending a gentle hill lined with the homes of the peninsula’s full-time residents. Outside the occasional artist or New Age reflexologist, the majority of the houses here are owned by people who teach school or sell insurance or work for the local fire brigade or have retired from the navy or the shipyard in Bath and are trying to get by on a pension and social security. These houses – many of which (like my own) could use several licks of paint – soon give way to open fields and the main route back west towards town. I mention all this because I have driven this stretch of road three, four times a week ever since Dan and I moved here years ago. Bar the two weeks a year when we have been out of town on vacation, the town of Damariscotta, Maine, has been the centre of everything in my life. Just recently the thought struck me:
I don’t have a passport
. And the last time I left the country was way back in l989, my senior year at the University of Maine, when I talked my then-boyfriend Dan to drive with me up to Quebec City for a long weekend. Back then you could still cross into Canada with an American driver’s license. It was the Winter Carnival in Quebec City. Snow was everywhere. The streets of the Old City were cobbled. The architecture was gingerbread house. Everyone spoke French. I’d never seen anything so magical and foreign before. Even Dan – who was initially a little unnerved by the different language, the weird accent – became charmed by it all. Though the little hotel in which we spent those four happy days was a bit run-down and had a narrow double bed that creaked loudly every time we made love, it was a sublimely romantic time for us – and, I am pretty certain, the moment when I became pregnant with Ben. But before we knew that we were about to become parents – a discovery that changed the course of everything in our lives –