The Jetsetters

by Amanda Eyre Ward

as if they were a movie he wanted to like but just didn’t.

All Charlotte wanted was to drive home, pour a cold glass of Barefoot Chardonnay, and drink the cold glass of Barefoot Chardonnay.

But strangers seeing you as someone you couldn’t bear to be was simply one of the indignities of age.

But suddenly she wanted nothing more than to walk through a European city again—to feel that thrill of a foreign and more glamorous place—a place where she herself was foreign and glamorous.

Love yourself? What did that even mean?

Oh. At last. Here is the person meant just for me.

She was above the sorts of vacations she could afford. And so she had stayed put.

This was one of the pleasures of recovery: you opened the door to the pain and gnawing tedium, but joy came in as well. All of it, all of it, brilliant and clean and true.

Were these even relationships, or just data trails, vestiges of the love between people who had once been family?

How wonderful it felt to be held by a mother who knew you.

But the thing about being an addict was that it didn’t even matter that he understood what he was doing—that he’d done the same thing a hundred million times and every time it had come to ruin.

Maybe the answer had always been in that dining room—that together, they would be okay.

Charlotte was both sorry for and proud of the woman she had been.

You are the trampoline, not the gleeful jumper.

Cord gazed at the low stone houses and thought, I should move to Greece and harvest olives.

“We must come to a settlement, Torvald. During eight whole years…we have never exchanged one serious word about serious things.”

“Sometimes you need to stand in the footsteps of history, and sometimes, a day at the beach.”

How lonely it was to have no witness to her life. No one to guard her passage into slumber, no one to know that she had made it through the night.

Life was so precious and so short.

“Shining Rio, there you lie,”

there was something deeply moving about approaching land from the sea.

Lee had never realized how hideous most of the world was until Rome.

IN CHARLOTTE’S DREAMS, SHE was young again.

Martyrdom was a hard habit to break.

And you get to a point in your life, Cord, when you wonder if there’s anything big left to happen to you.”

Regan felt as if she were inhabiting—just for a moment—the person she’d once dreamed she’d become.