Someone once said, "You can't go home again." Another said, "There's no going back to the start." Well, that was all well and good, but they must've not had many friends where they started. And they must not have had many friends write to them about another mutual friend's failing health.
In other words, she was only going back because they had guilted her into it. She had better things to do than go back to New York City. And she certainly had better things to do than go back to New York City during Christmas.
Christmas, she thought with a shudder, in New York. With all of the gang back together, or so she heard. A big, noisy turnout where everything that could go wrong would go wrong and then some.
Not that she minded chaos, you see, for that was what she lived for. It was just the fact that she was going back to what she had been all too eager to leave nearly eight years before. And she was doing it willingly.
She could have said no, she realized. She could have made up an excuse, which would have been all too easy for her to do, and nobody would have thought anything else about it. They could have gone on with their Christmas-ing and she could have gone on with her everyday life in Maine. She was even saving up money to go back to Europe and stay with family. Now she spent it all again on a trip back to New York because her conscience got the best of her as it always did.
Then again, she cared a great deal about Marty. Stupid gimp, she thought even as a smile touched her lips, stupid, sweet, loveable gimp. She knew that it could quite possibly be the last time any of them saw him, because he was admitted to the hospital after coming down with a severe case of pneumonia. Perhaps that's why everyone was in such a hurry to get back, and in such a hurry to rush her back as well.
Well, if all that was true, she thought as she stood outside the old lodging house, then I'll make the best of it. Then after the gimp gets well I can go back to Maine and do whatever I want and not have to deal with them again.
Not that she didn't love all her friends; she'd do anything for them. But that chapter of her life was over. They had moved on, so why couldn't she?
Shaking her head and adjusting the ratty burlap sack over her should, Andrianne "Timber" DeMarco stepped inside the lodging house again. Immediately her nose picked up familiar scents, her eyes softened at the familiar sights of little (and not so little) boys and girls running around, and all doubt of her coming back faded away.
She was home.