You're the one for me.
The thing about my mother-in-law is that if she’s in the mood to buy you something, you have to commit as soon as humanly possible before she changes her mind. So when she offered to fly Bear to Seattle so that we could all help her look for a vacation home, we just…booked tickets for ourselves. No, we couldn’t afford it, and I’d barely clawed my vacation balance back to zero at work, but Clementine was still lap-baby-eligible and hence free, and if we traveled around Labor Day and booked redeyes we could almost kind of sort of make it work.
A comical amount of things went wrong on the way to Seattle. Five minutes before we left for the airport, the skies opened up so fast that the streets started to flood and traffic built up. We’d been inside of IAH for less than five minutes when we realized that Clementine didn’t have her puppy, her best friend in the whole world, who she’d definitely been holding on the shuttle bus. It took Logan two search trips to find it while I printed our tickets and waited in line for an agent to verify Clementine’s birth certificate. (It was under a trash can by the shuttle stop, where she must have thrown it while we were sorting out luggage.) We’d made it to the check-in kiosk within the allotted window, even with the rain and the shuttle bus and the puppy search, but by the time I got to the counter we were two minutes “late,” and the agent refused to let us go through security. There was a flight to Seattle in the morning but it was full, so we ended up on a flight to Vegas that would connect us to Seattle after a seven-hour layover.
The shops in the Vegas airport closed as we arrived and I had to beg someone at Starbucks to give us two applesauce pouches for Clementine that I couldn’t pay for because the registers were closed. We slept on the floor in the airport, waking up every ten or fifteen minutes to a fire alarm test with flashing lights and a robotic overhead announcement that went on for two minutes at a time.
By the time we landed at SeaTac I was so tired that I was too nauseous to eat. And somehow I missed the part of trip planning where we would be sleeping on Logan’s aunt’s floor? Oh, also I’d just had minor abdominal surgery (“You’re flying when?” —my doctor), and the day before I left, my boss told me she had an “exciting opportunity” for me that involved more work and no title or salary upgrade.
But as I was pushing our double stroller through the airport, hauling our car seat over my shoulder in a cheap nylon bag, ordering a $1 banana and an apple juice at a 24-hour Nathan’s Hot Dogs and choking it down while Logan and I took turns trying to sleep and trying to keep Clementine entertained, sweating from the pain of walking around with three healing incisions, we didn’t turn on each other. It felt like everything that could possibly go wrong had, but we propped each other up. We were a unit.
The trip, even after all the drama, did end up being restful. We took a ferry to a little island and walked around, enjoyed the park in weather that didn’t seem determined to boil us alive, visited a community garden.
We got a day to explore Seattle without the kids, and Logan took me to Capitol Hill, the scene of his dangerous young man phase. Before the trip, he’d looked for his apartment building on Google Maps and hadn’t been able to find it. We assumed it had been torn down, but I wanted to see where it used to be. To our surprise, when we rounded the corner, there it was, 1920s red brick framing propped-open windows full of box fans and big leafy ferns. I took a picture for him and got a little teary-eyed behind my sunglasses thinking about how this street was the last place he lived before coming back to Houston, one of two possibilities he was considering, and objectively the least appealing.
If he’d gone the other way, I wouldn’t have sent him a message asking him if he wanted to get dinner when I moved back myself, wouldn’t have had a witness when I drank the remaining vinegar like a shot at the vegan dumpling place, wouldn’t have turned to him on what I couldn’t figure out was a date and asked, “So are you into me or what?”
His old payday pizza place was only a few blocks away so we headed to get a slice. There was a jellyfish painted outside with the words, “There may be other jellyfish in the sea, but you’re the one for me.” I felt the threat of tears but pulled myself together, because who cries at a pizza place?
We got in line. He asked me what I wanted as the cashier took a fresh pizza out of the oven and slid it onto the counter behind the glass. “Oh, never mind. I got you,” he said to me, and then, “Two pestos, please,” to the guy.
We stepped outside and ate the slices, greasy and perfect, on the sidewalk. He told me about how the menu description of the pizza we were eating used to say only, “Green pizza?” (Remember the time before pesto was a thing?) Before we left I snapped a picture of the graffiti and we headed back to the car, holding hands. “I feel like we’ve seen enough of the city, do you want to drive into the suburbs and eat at a mall?” I very much did.