Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

“Why not make it into something better?” “Because it’s enough.”

“Because it’s everything a person needs to live a decent life. It has a stove for heat. A fridge to keep your food cold and a stove to cook it when you’re ready to eat it. It has a bathtub and a shower to get you clean after your chores and a bed to lie down in at the end of the day. And that’s all a person really needs. And I think the whole trouble with us is that we think we need so much more.”

“If I was in the city, I’d be the same person I’d always been, and we wouldn’t have a chance to do something new. You want to spend time with me, spend time. You want a better relationship? We’ll make one from scratch. Right here, right now, buddy boy. Stay.”

“People take little vacations from their lives all the time.”

It either is or it isn’t, but whatever it is, it’s the way you feel. You can put any kind of judgment you want on the way you feel, but that won’t make it go away.

the “Flower Duet” from Lakmé.

She could do anything it came into her head to do, no matter how utterly it defied the rules she had lived by all her life.

Then she hung up the phone, got out of bed, and—for the first time in her life as far as she could recall—dressed in the same clothes she’d worn the previous day.

But I’m already gray, Roseanna thought. You just don’t know it because my colorist is a genius. But people would know soon. That was second on the list for her new life, after putting on weight. Letting her hair revert to its natural gray.

But it’s in the city. And everything is so complicated. Everywhere you want to go, it’s always so hard to get there. And the air is barely breathable. And it’s dirty. And there are all these fees and expenses involved with living there. Not that I couldn’t afford it. But I had to work hard to afford it. I don’t know anymore how I lived in the city. It’s strange—I left yesterday morning, and now I look back and I don’t know how I lived there. Now I think heaven is more like . . . like just what you need to live a decent life.

There’s a reason people will always let you down. It’s because they came to this weird planet to live their own lives. Not anybody else’s. Classic case of needs in conflict.

I think the whole problem with this world is that we control our kids too much. What they naturally are just seems too darned inconvenient for us, so we get impatient with it, and we tell them not to be who they are.

living in her new home was all about feeling exposed—feeling the sun and the wind and the cold. And living in the city was about being insulated.

“True. I guess I’m good at other people’s confrontations. Turns out I’m not so good at my own.”

I’m going to be old myself pretty soon here, and I hope a few people will still love me even if I don’t look so great.”

Other times I just sit with the boredom. If you even want to call it that. We could just as easily call it serenity and not put the negative connotation on it. It’s not the worst thing in the world, doing nothing. You just have to get used to it.”

Life always held some surprise that made you wish you had two strong arms and a solid chest for support.

“I’ve been acting like heaven is a place with no people in it, so there’ll be no one to bother me. Like that’s what’s really important in life—no minor irritations. But then there’s no one to delight me, either.

Just for a moment she almost called him on it, the way she would have when he was a boy. Don’t talk with your mouth full. That sort of motherly jab. She stopped herself. He wasn’t a boy. A time comes in the life of a mother and son when that kind of mothering crosses the line into critical behavior. At age thirty he could eat and talk in any way he saw fit.

Just that it’s not very realistic to think you won’t go back and forth on this. It’s just how emotions are. They rise and fall. Chunks of them fly up when you least expect it.

It was a truth best kept to herself.

“Relationships are never a done deal,” Neal said. “There’s always hard work involved.”