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the bacon sizzling, the lime aftershave splashed on his father’s pitted cheeks, the salty smell of Porter, the Labrador, and Nat’s mother’s perfume—Safari. Coffee, Lemon Pledge, ocean. Downy fabric softener, blooming dogwood trees, butter. The smell of Westchester County, so different from the heavy, scorched smell of Texas. The June morning was warm, and the sea crashed outside the window, its breezes snapping the sails of the boats lined up along the swaying dock. Nat’s family’s house was right on the water, and if Franny were to open her eyes, she would see Long Island Sound. I am so lucky to be here, thought Franny, willing herself to believe it.
    In her head, she made a list of the things she did feel: trapped, nervous, apprehensive, sad. She wanted to slip out of the expensive sheets, tiptoe down the stairs, past the kitchen, out the front door with its huge brass knocker in the shape of an anchor, down the pathway to the wooden gate. Once outside the gate, she would hitch a ride in someone’s BMW to the station and buy a ticket back to the city. She would find a new, clean apartment, and…But the fantasy ended there, alone in an empty apartment.
    Ever since Uncle Jack had sent her to boarding school when she was sixteen, Franny had felt out of place. She could remember the first fall at Kent School in Connecticut: sunset-colored leaves, smirking boys in their blazers, girls with long hair and bangs that feathered just right. Franny had Texas clothes: stonewashed jeans, skirts made out of bright cotton with matching tops. She wore eyeshadow and pantyhose, used hairspray. She didn’t know what people meant by The Vineyard or Stratton. When Franny woke in her dorm room, her body filled with dreams of the Gatestown prison, there was no one who would understand, the way her childhood friends had.
    Franny made herself lose her accent in a matter of weeks, but sometimes she slipped, saying pin for pen or fixing to or y’all. The other girls made fun of her curling iron and the sweater sets Uncle Jack had bought for her in Waco. One night, when the dorm had a “white trash party,” two girls stopped by Franny’s room, asking to borrow her clothes.
    Franny learned. By her senior year, she was as snide as the rest, and wore Birkenstocks and Indian-print skirts. She Robo-ed, drinking a bottle of Robitussin cough medicine and hallucinating. She chewed tobacco, because the prefects couldn’t smell it the way they could cigarette smoke.
    At Yale, just three hours from Kent, Franny could talk about ski lodges, and about who was so Choate and who was Miss Halls all the way. She used words like sweet and whatever. When she went home on rare occasions, she felt out of place in Texas, superior to her old classmates and her beloved Uncle Jack. By the time she met Nat, she didn’t belong anywhere. She wanted to escape Nat’s house and their impending marriage: escape, the faint hope that the next place would be better, was her only comfort.
    When do you stop trusting the instinct to run? Franny wondered. When do you accept that you will never feel at home, no matter where you go? When do you just make yourself stay?
    “Franny?” Nat’s voice was loud outside the guest room door.
    “I’m awake.”
    The door opened, and Nat came inside. He held out a cup of steaming coffee to her. He had circles under his eyes, and his hair stood up in tufts. “Are you happy, Miss Bride?” he asked.
    Franny sat up in bed. “How could I not be?” she said, holding out her hands for the cup.
    “I never know what you mean when you say things like that,” said Nat. His face darkened. He still wore his pajama pants and his Williams sweatshirt.
    “Things like what?”
    “I just wish,” said Nat, crossing his arms over his chest, “that you could say, ‘Yes, I’m happy.’”
    The coffee was black and strong. In the mirror across from the bed, Franny could see herself. She looked thin, and she looked tired, but she did not look