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I remembered that Don had family in Massachusetts. His uncle and cousins ran a deli in a town called Winchester—the way that man would talk about the sandwiches they’d make…god, what I wouldn’t do for one of them right now. 

Anyway, I figured it couldn’t hurt to check the place out. He wasn’t at the deli—I didn’t expect him to be, that would’ve been quite the fucking coincidence, but I did find exactly what I was hoping for. An address on an old bill. Presumably, his uncle’s home address. 

It’s a few towns over, so I’m headed there now. 

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This area is nice. I haven’t spent all that time in Massachusetts, at least outside of Boston and Provincetown. But it’s warm and sunny and there’s a little humidity creeping into the air and (deep breath), I don’t know, it’s nice. Despite everything, I’m feeling…hopeful. 

It reminds me a little of where I grew up. There are more houses and the houses are closer together—I’m sure there are parts of Massachusetts that are rural, but I am squarely in the suburbs. I don’t know, maybe it’s just that spring has finally arrived and the changing of the seasons always makes me think of home. 

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Huh. I haven’t thought about my childhood home as home in a long time. Home has been nebulous, ever-changing in my mind. But I guess if I’ve ever had a touchstone, it’s the house I grew up in and…New York City. Touchstones of a different kind. But places that my mind always leaps to if I’m confronted with something that reminds me in the slightest of them. 

I don’t think you can ever really run away from home. That’s more or less what I did, but it lingers, always. You can never undo the way that you’ve been shaped. You can pour new concrete over the broken sidewalk, but the footprints left on the previous layers will always be there, waiting to be revealed when the fresh new coat eventually erodes. 

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(a small laugh) I can hear Harry’s voice in my head correcting my metaphor. Making it about paint—where you grow up is the charcoal sketch and no matter how much you paint over a canvas, the layers and textures are always there. But I don’t know painting. Not that I know concrete but…

That’s one of those things I always figured would be the deciding factor in whether or not Harry—I mean, she’s sophisticated, you know? I don’t know if she can hear this up in Maine—I’m sure she can, but maybe she doesn’t have the radio turned on. She’d probably be happy to hear it anyway. That I think of her as sophisticated. But she is. Her secret love for Hank Williams and all. She appreciates fine things, delicate things, beautiful things. 

And I’m not any of that. I’ve always been rough and blunt—the finest thing I do is picking a lock or breaking a safe and even then, sometimes brute force is the best way forward. Harry is a painting, and I’m a block of concrete. 

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God, I hope Don isn’t listening to this. He’d never let me live it down. 

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