1.
Carter was packing. Carter hated packing. He worried about packing too much and packing too little and packing the wrong stuff. He'd been packing for more than a week, actually, and he still wasn't finished. He put a sweater in and then took it out, replaced it with a different one, and then spent half a day wondering if he really needed to pack a sweater at all. Wouldn't sweatshirts be good enough? How cold was it actually going to be, anyway? Edward said he'd be sleeping in a cabin with some of the logging crew, and Carter wasn't sure if that meant roughing it or not.
Not that he had anything against roughing it. He liked camping. He didn't mind being cold or wet. All in all, he thought of himself as a mellow, relaxed kind of guy. For the most part. Other than the whole packing thing, which was obviously causing him to lose his mind.
He wasn't sure if he was going to need dressier clothes. What if an occasion presented itself where he needed to get dressed up, and he hadn't brought anything appropriate?
Carter was definitely beginning to suspect that he was in over his head.
He'd written so many articles that the total number of pages must surely be five or six times the length of this book he was going to write, so it wasn't that he was worried about that. Partially it was being away from a familiar place for such a long period of time--he expected he'd be living with the logging crew for about a month, and he didn't have any illusions about how much they were going to like him. He pretty much represented everything the logging industry viewed as its mortal enemy.
Flaky environmentalist guy, that was him. Caring about the trees and the animals instead of people and their wallets full of money.
When it came right down to it, he should just consider himself lucky that it wasn't too far a drive--if he hadn't lived on the west coast, he'd have had to fly, and that would have been a thousand times worse. He didn't do well on airplanes. If he'd had flying to anticipate, he'd have been throwing up every half hour, the current jumble of nerves in his stomach twisted into something impossible.
Across the room the clock on his microwave was blinking, blinking, blinking. The power seemed to go out every week and he'd given up in disgust after the first five or six times he'd re-set it.
It wasn't like he was going to regret leaving this apartment, which he didn't quite hate. It was a close thing, though.
He'd moved in the few things that Shannon had insisted he take--honestly, he would have preferred to make a completely fresh start, but she'd been so adamant that in the end it had been easier to just go along with what she'd wanted. She'd had such a rough time of it that it didn't seem fair, somehow, to do anything else that would stress her out. Even something as simple as telling her that he didn't want to take the coffee table and the padded chairs.
Because that was the way to go, to make her feel better, right? Oh no, Shan, I think I'd rather not have any mementos of our life together. I'd rather forget about you completely.
So he took the coffee table and the chairs and the kitchen stuff, and he bought a couch, a bed and a little table that worked as a dining room table, even though he didn't have a dining room and the chairs didn't match the table he'd bought.
And so it felt weird that even though he was nervous about going, he was also really not interested in staying. He wanted to write the book, that was for sure. He had notes and research. All he needed now were the interviews.
)
