Suede Boots and Sushi Burritos

The dashboard says eighty-four degrees, but that’s not the heat I’m feeling. Fourteen days. For eighteen years I measured time in school years and growth charts and dentist appointments. Now it’s collapsed down to two weeks, and I can’t stop counting.

My cousin’s voice comes crackling through the Bluetooth, loud with an optimism that’s thirty years old. He’s telling us about the best years of his life, the friends he made in some concrete dorm room, the freedom of it all. My daughter is grinning in the passenger seat. It’s a wide, easy grin, nothing weighing it down. She’s hearing a future she hasn’t lived yet. I’m stuck doing the math on how she’s going to survive it.

To her, college is going to be loads of fun. To me, it’s a list of things nobody will be there to remind her to do. Will she drink enough water when it’s ninety degrees out? Will she skip breakfast because she slept through her alarm again? Sitting next to her in the car, I keep thinking about how the passenger door is the last real barrier between her and a world where she has to look out for herself. My love used to be something physical, something between her and whatever could hurt her. Now it’s going to be a voice on the phone. That’s the part I can’t get used to.

The mall is quiet for a weekday afternoon, that low hum places get when nobody’s in a hurry. At the pickup counter, there’s a box waiting with the boots she ordered online, knee-high, black suede. She pulls them out right there to check the fit, and under the fluorescent lights they look like they belong to someone older. Someone who walks across a campus full of fall leaves, not the kid who used to kick her sneakers off by the front door. We walk past a few more shoe stores after that, but nothing really pulls us in. We’re not there to shop anymore. We’re just there.

The food court has its own version of quiet, the after-lunch kind. No lines, no rush, just people drifting between stalls. We get in line for sushi burritos, and around us the whole place is speaking languages we don’t. A family ahead of us is going back and forth in fast, easy Spanish. Behind us, a mother and daughter are trading soft sentences in Mandarin. They’ve got whole worlds tucked inside those words. We just have English, and standing there I found myself wishing we had more, some other way in to a world that keeps getting bigger while we stand still.

We grab the food, swing through the Starbucks drive-thru, and point the car toward a house that’s about to become something different.

On the way home she’s completely checked out, in the best way. Thumbs flying across her phone, texting someone about something, laughing at a video I can’t see. She’s already halfway gone, off in some group chat with a dozen other kids standing on the same ledge she is.

I drive and let my mind wander to what exactly I’m supposed to do with myself once my main job moves three states away. For almost twenty years my days have run on the sound of her — doors slamming, laughing down the hallway, that constant low buzz of a teenager living her life. Now I’m staring down a quiet that already feels too loud. I keep picturing dinner with my husband at a table built for four, and wondering what we’ll even talk about once it’s just the two of us again. Who am I on a random Tuesday afternoon when she doesn’t need me for anything?

People call it empty nest syndrome, and the name has always sounded a little hollow to me, like a shell somebody left behind in a tree. She’s about to learn how to fly in those new boots. I’m the one who has to figure out how to live in what’s left over.