Facility Part Two

I left my alone and away time in New York to meet my husband at my older son’s baseball spring training.

I left feeling like all my dreams had come true and my book was as good as published and motherhood was simple and problems were small.

This was all easy enough to think while it was up to New York. I’d made it there so contractually speaking, it followed: I could now make it anywhere.

I’d try Florida!

I landed in Orlando at a time that would allow for daylight driving because I’ve learned the hard way that my eyeballs are more decorative than operative past a certain hour now. When I arrive in unfamiliar places, and drive in weird rental cars and in directions I don’t understand on poorly lit highways, facing the glare of oncoming headlights, I might look to other motorists like I’m driving. But really I’m just sitting there pressing the gas and guessing.

So at the comfy, sunlit hour of 6pm, I drove the 45 minutes to the resort where my son was staying. His team had been divided into small groups and assigned to rows of prefab houses. Bumpy stucco exteriors, all with screened in pools to keep out mosquitos and alligators, all iterations of the same plan with only minor tweaks — an extra window here, a gable over the door there. A neighborhood in which you could most definitely go home to the wrong house.