“You’re all set.” He hands the materials back to me, gesturing for the person behind me to step forward. “Next!”

None of this is my usual experience. I usually skid into the airport with less than an hour to spare, late from packing, overthinking, and re-packing. But this is the day. My day. I’ve been fantasizing about it for nearly half my life.

I heave a sigh. For all the countless times I’ve imagined today, I never considered how it would test my patience. I’ve waited thirteen years for my life to change, but a minute longer might break me.

My nerves are thanks to my grandmother, Gloria. She always insisted that my twin sister Rae and I call her Gloria, not Grandma, because she refuses to feel old. (Two technicalities: One, her real name is actually Gladys, but nobody’s dared call her that since she was old enough to jettison that clunker. And two, she is ninety years old.) In 1955, straight out of secretarial school, she got a splashy job working at an ad agency in Manhattan. She adored it—not only the gig, which gave her work assisting important people and a salary of $92 per week, but the lifestyle: date nights with ad men at shows on Broadway, beautiful restaurants and boutiques on Madison Avenue, pocket money to buy pearls at Fortunoff, cigarettes on Central Park benches, city air. A life completely different from the one she grew up with across the East River in Brooklyn. If she got married, she’d be expected to get pregnant and give up working. So, she broke off one engagement to a nice but boring lawyer, then broke off a second one to a handsome but bland doctor. And then it happened.

The vision came to her on a lunch break with her fellow secretaries. She was enjoying a pastrami sandwich on rye and listening to Annette Lyons gossip when her vision blurred. She felt dizzy and warm, like she was floating in a hot bath: disorienting, but not unpleasant. She saw herself—not as she was, sitting in the red vinyl deli booth in her favorite cardigan trimmed with rhinestone buttons—but holding hands with a man, looking deliriously happy. She couldn’t see his face. Then the voice came, soft at first, then loud and full of static, like a blaring radio tuned to the wrong frequency. June 1, 1958. She didn’t know why, but she was certain that was the date she would meet the man she was meant to be with. As quickly as the feeling came on, it vanished.