Free To See the Moon Again by Jamie Langston Turner

time here this evening after they ate—a sort of private observance to close the school year and usher in her sabbatical.
    It was almost four thirty by the time they made their way through the campus traffic and were finally seated in a place called Sticky Fingers in downtown Greenville, a drive of some thirty minutes, during which Marcy sprang it on Julia that this was to be her treat—an end-of-year, beginning-of-sabbatical, I’ll-miss-you celebration.
    Though not a sentimental person, Julia suddenly realized that she would look back fondly on this outing with her friend. For years she had taken Marcy for granted, had even been annoyed with her on a regular basis, but now it struck her that she would miss seeing her, eating with her, hearing her stories and gossip.
    As a friend, Marcy deserved more credit than Julia gave her. She made few demands and not only excused small slights but seemed to have no memory of them afterward. Further, she was clearly bright, though she seemed to think she had been hired at Millard-Temple only by some stroke of luck. She often expressed wonder that someone with Julia’s mind would stoop to be her friend. “Don’t say things like that,” Julia had told her more than once. “You’re the one who knows Brit Lit inside out.”
    But Marcy would always laugh and counter with something like “What I know about Brit Lit could maybe fill a demitasse, but don’t ask me anything about any other kind of lit. I’m the one who thought Hiawatha was a girl, remember.”
    They continued to look at the menu after the waitress took their drink orders, Marcy reading aloud and exclaiming over the various items. By now Julia was already being reminded that Marcy’s cheerfulness was hard to take for long stretches. Somehow she willed herself to relax, however. She was in no hurry. The more time here, the less time at home. She faded in and out of Marcy’s outflow of talk, occasionally providing an answer to a question or filling a pause with a brief remark.
    At one point Marcy stopped, slapped the table on both sides of her plate of ribs, and said, “Shoot, girl, I’m going to miss you next year! Who’s going to listen to me? Larry’s going to miss you, too, I’ll tell you—he’ll be the one who has to sit through all my saved-up words at the end of the day. Poor guy, he’ll be begging for the condensed edition!” Larry was Marcy’s husband, about whom Julia knew more than she cared to. Most of it was good, however, for according to Marcy, Larry was “a husband to die for.”
    Afterward they walked all the way down Main Street to the Liberty Bridge, a cantilevered affair over the Reedy River. They stopped in a few of the shops along the way and got ice cream at one of them. When Marcy dropped her off by her car back at the college almost three hours later, Julia allowed an awkward hug before she opened the door to get out. Marcy put a hand on her arm. “Hey, kiddo, you seem a little down. You going to be okay?”
    Julia nodded. “Oh, sure, I’ll be fine.”
    â€œIt’s been a hard year for you,” Marcy said. “You deserve some time off.” She cocked her head. “So, what are you going to do with yourself?”
    They had been over this ground before, but only in general terms. “Oh, a little of this and that,” Julia said.
    Marcy waited a moment to see if there was more, then said, “Well, I’ll tell you what I’d do if I had a year off. I’d go back to Kansas and spend a whole month in the town where I grew up. I’d drive by my old house at least once a day and visit my old schools and the grocery store and the library and the church and the park and my granddaddy’s barber shop and all the rest of it. I’d relive my whole childhood, right up to the day I got married and had to start being a boring old adult.” She laughed.