The bus to New Falls was halfway across New Jersey before Maja began to breathe deeply again. The Port Authority bus station, with its nauseating scent of ammonia and exhaust, was mercifully behind her. They’d left the highway and were now twisting along a country road bordered by crop fields, soybeans, maybe, she wasn’t sure. She would have to learn. She could plant a vegetable garden behind the house, she thought. People did that in the country. She imagined herself in jeans and a straw hat, pulling things from vines and carrying them back to her kitchen, eating only what was seasonal. Then she laughed. This wasn’t Eat Pray Love, and moving to Pennsylvania was more about searching for extra square footage than searching for new meaning in her life. Although she wouldn’t object to a little inner peace to go with all that space.

Moving to New Falls had been her idea. Ted laughed at her when she first brought it up. She couldn’t even drive! There’d been no need to learn, growing up in the city. College was only six subway stops away in Clinton Hill, and after she met Ted, he’d always driven on their weekend trips to the beach rentals they shared with friends. I’ll learn to drive, she’d said, and Ted had pulled a look of mock horror and asked her if that was a promise or a threat.

Ted had grown up in the New Jersey suburbs and dreamed of New York City. He’d never considered living anywhere else. He watched his father do the long commute into the city for twenty years, and swore he’d never do the same. If he was going to work in the city, he was going to live there. Of course, he’d also sworn that he would never go into something as dull as banking. But after a hungry stint writing music reviews, that’s exactly what he’d done, turning his father’s connections into a well-paid investment banking job. It wasn’t until recently, however, that he’d started making the serious money, paid out as bonuses. And now, at forty, it had been surprisingly easy for Maja to convince him to move back to the suburbs.