How I Spent My Summer Vacation

We drove, day before yesterday, around the neighborhood a little in the atrocious heat. There was artisan mozzarella and guaranteed sweet corn at the tiny Italian farmer's market, so we got some. We gaped and oohed at the gorgeous Victorian and Grecian homes in her new neighborhood at fifteen miles an hour with no one behind us to honk, and found where a waterfall came out of the side of the hill to crash into the canal that goes into the Hudson. Then we went down the street to Wynantskill and got antipasto salad and the best cannoli you ever saw, at least a million calories apiece she said, filled with mascarpone and whipped cream and chocolate chips and drizzled with chocolate syrup.
We had gotten everything put together the day before, right before the worst of the heat set in. No air-conditioning in a third-floor walkup on a ninety-degree day is no joke, and the two fans we had pointed at us didn't keep the sweat dried off. We had to wait until after dark to put up the curtain rods because it was more than a hundred degrees by the ceiling. Fabulous, eleven-foot, white-molding ceilings, but hot bastards nonetheless.
Here is what everything was: She put together the six-drawer Ikea Hemnes dresser while I was at the stores all day Wednesday getting stuff to finish out the apartment and taking a conference call. She and I fought a huge pitched battle with her enormous Ikea padded headboard frame; it came with six vital screw-holes in very awkward places not predrilled. If an Indonesian Ikea worker ever hears the words, "My name is Loosey Ricardo. You did not drill the leg-holder holes for my daughter's bed. Prepare to die", he should not be surprised.  The nightstand was a piece of cake. The dining room table was enormously heavy and the pegs were a huge bitch to pound in; we did ruin a cake of Dial soap her aunt had randomly given her by rubbing it on the pegs and that helped some but our latissimus dorsi will probably never be the same anyway. Three of the four dining chairs were no big deal, the fourth had mis-drilled holes, easily corrected once the Home Depot trip to obtain drill bits was completed. The six-foot bookshelf was completed in the time it took Steel Magnolias to run; Shelby lay dying, refusing to open her eyes, as I pounded the nails into its back.  The lamps just screwed together; Ikea had fooled us with displaying the wrong bulbs for them, but Home Depot to the rescue again, and a couple of white-wire shelf units for the kitchen and office nook later, all we need is....a microwave stand. Her grandfather got her a microwave that looked small on the box and out of the box was HUGE, wouldn't fit on the counter, and had to squat on the floor in the corner in the dining room to prepare our guaranteed sweet corn that it was just too fuckin hot to boil water for. Incidentally: if you wash it and leave the inside leaves on, microwaving about two and a half minutes an ear makes mightyfine sweet corn without heating up the house. Damn, it was good.
The drive to New York was a nightmare of pain; she was a trouper but it was fourteen hours of bad road the first day and twelve hours of better road the next. Alabama I am talking to you, Interstate 59 is not supposed to be two lanes with a sand shoulder. Pulling a car on a dolly down that, in the dark, is best described as a growth experience. One that firmly establishes the belief that Alabama's chief traffic engineer should have to do that task nightly. Tennessee and Virginia know how to pave a highway, but Pennsyvania, for godsakes, all those picturesque buggies on the side roads do not make up for the overwhelming smell of cowshit in the entire Lehigh valley and the washboard interstate interspersed with roadwork crashwalls with no outside lane stripe. The four and a half hours of getting to New Jersey, getting covered with bruises fighting the Ikea boxes into the Penske truck, and driving to the apartment were minor in comparison. And her building manager came through like a champ; he got his brother to come for the weekend, who was formerly a mover, and the two of them moved everything up two impossibly narrow and steep flights of stairs cheerfully. After the first day at the apartment, I had to throw away my TENS unit electrodes; they are meant to last for months but I had sweated off the gel in the drive and during the New Jersey Ikea leg. But they came through when needed and I just subbed in a bunch of Lidocaine patches; I had been wearing both to make it on the trip.
I filled up her fridge and cabinets with food and organized her kitchen and utility closet. Her apartment is beautiful, a jewel-box of peach and yellow with blue and brown accents. She is doing what she does best: worrying. About passing her intro tests, about finding friends, about being homesick. I had tried to talk her into moving a few weeks later, closer to the beginning of school, but she wanted to be settled; now she is anxious about loneliness. She drove me to the airport yesterday and couldn't talk when we hugged goodbye; she did the death-grip like when she hung onto me at college and begged me not to go off and leave her there, after she had begged me to let her go off that far. So I did what I have always done when she panics. Fight my own panic down, back into the corner where it needs to die. Forget that I wanted her to stay two more weeks, hell, that I wanted her to pursue that offer from New Orleans for Christ's sake, not godforsaken New York fucking snowbound State.  Straighten out my face, my voice, my neck. Look all happy, all calm, all reassuring, all cheerful. Say something completely rude to make her laugh. And once I get the laugh, kiss her up and remind her that we've been here before, that she felt this way at Trinity and ended up loving it and missing it and having to go see it this October; and that we are Steel Magnolias who can drive a big orange truck towing a cute blue car and put together furniture and say fuck doing it and bake awesome cookies to thank the nice guys for moving and make it all look easy. And in four years we will be laughing about this now, and she will be homesick for Troy on her way to somewhere else, because she will have done great here and had a great time and now she's just got to go back and start on that. Right? Right.