The Long Way Home After a Cancelled Flight, by David Sedaris

Ordinarily, I hate staying at someone’s house, but when Hugh and I visited his friend Mary in Maine we had no other choice. There weren’t any hotels on the small island where she lives in the summer, and she’d seemed so genuine when she extended her invitation that we really couldn’t refuse. Mary and Hugh went to college together a hundred thousand years ago, back when tuition was affordable and you could study things like acting without bankrupting yourself. Her auburn hair had turned mostly white since I’d last seen her, fifteen years earlier, and she wore it in an untidy bun.

There was another old classmate of Hugh and Mary’s at the house that weekend. Luckily, his girlfriend was there as well, thus there were two of us who felt left out when the talk turned to former teachers and whatever happened to so-and-so.

Mary’s secluded four-bedroom house was deep in the woods yet, still, on the waterfront. The bay she faced was quiet and as calm as a pond. It was August and we’d hit a patch of perfect weather. The days were warm without being hot, the sky blue and cloudless.

“I do have one rule,” she said when we arrived. “No cell phones, iPads, or laptops on the ground floor.”

You what? I thought. But it was her house, and so, for the first time in recent memory, I spent two and a half days talking to people and having them talk back. It was shocking to see no one staring down at their devices. That said, at our ages, we sort of needed them. “Did anyone see that movie . . . the funny one directed by the Greek who did that other movie about what’s-her-name? Oh, you know, it starred . . . that actor. She was on that British TV show?”

A phone would have moved us along quicker. Still, it was refreshing not to have one. No photos were shared, no social-media posts. If you wanted to check your e-mail or text someone, you were free to do so in your second-floor bedroom or up in the third-story crow’s nest, but then you’d miss whatever was being talked about. That was the rub, since anything said by our hostess and two fellow-guests was far more interesting than a fifteen-second video of a Komodo dragon eating a baby goat. I don’t know how Instagram tagged me as a person who wants to watch this sort of thing, but it was right on the money.

I wish I could say I spent three days entirely offline, but I had my Duolingo streak to maintain, so I sneaked off twice a day and did my German lessons while getting my steps in. The coastal Maine landscape was not familiar to me, and I found it singularly beautiful—the pines, the rocks, the cattails. One afternoon, I saw a bald eagle and, the next, one of those eerie twelve-foot-tall Home Depot skeletons in someone’s front yard. It wasn’t standing upright but, rather, was on its knees, looking as though it were struggling to get back up. The skeleton wore a star-spangled vest, leading me to wonder if it wasn’t some kind of a political statement.

Compared with England, where I’d been only a few days earlier, the people on the island were remarkably friendly. Every driver that passed me waved, and the clerks in the two small grocery stores I ducked into were warm and chatty. While walking on that first afternoon, a man stopped his truck, introduced himself as Rocky, and asked me what my favorite color was. Do I even have one? I wondered, looking at him through the passenger-side window, on which rested the head of a panting dog.

“Red!” I said, just to offer an answer.

Rocky rooted around in a cloth bag beside him and handed me a tomato-hued flashlight the size of my penis when I was twelve. “Um, thanks,” I said.

Our dinners on the island were well thought out and prepared. Everyone but me was a terrific cook, and after eating we spent hours around the table, talking about America the way people in a play might. I liked seeing Hugh in the context of his old friends. The affection and respect he had for them was evident and put him in a good mood that lasted until we headed to the ferry that would take us back to the mainland.

“Just so you know, you are not doing your stupid Duolingo in the car,” he said through his teeth, smiling at the others as he waved goodbye from the driver’s seat.

Hugh is very handsome. Everyone says so and always has. Take a picture and he’s guaranteed to be the best-looking person in it, unless you’re at the Emmys or in Brazil. You never have to ask him twice to do something tedious or horrible: fill out visa forms for Pakistan, for instance. He is honest to a fault and true to his word. The trade-off is that he doesn’t travel well. Once he reaches his destination, he’s fine. It’s the door-to-door part that’s difficult, especially for me, who has to endure his short temper for however long it takes to get from point A to point B. “It’s not like we’re walking to Maine,” I’d reminded him on our way to Heathrow at the start of our trip. “You have absolutely nothing to complain about.”

This kind of talk only makes him angrier. “You can work anywhere,” he’ll remind me. “I’m the one being uprooted.” Sometimes a third party can tamp down his fury—my sister Amy, for instance, whom I began to wish we’d brought along.

“Just so you know, I am doing my Duolingo in the car,” I said as we left the gravel road that led from Mary’s house to the paved one, since another thing I’ve learned over the years is that tiptoeing around Hugh only makes him crabbier.

“Which line do I get in?” he demanded as we reached the ferry dock.

He asked this as if I’d spent my entire life on the island and travelling to the mainland and back was something I did every day.

“This woman here might know,” I said, rolling down my window.

“She’s on foot,” he snapped. “How can she help us.”

“O.K.,” I said. “Then how about that person over there with the uniform on.” That was when he noticed a sign telling us which line we should be in.

“Just put your arm back in the car,” he said, adding for the second time that morning that as someone who’d never got his license—who couldn’t be bothered to do even that—I had no idea what he was going through. Which was true.

It was a short ferry ride to the mainland, under thirty minutes, and by the time we arrived Hugh was reasonable again. Then came an uneventful, hour-long drive to Bangor airport. It was a Sunday, so there was no traffic to speak of. In the terminal, I bought a coffee and answered some backed-up e-mails. We were scheduled to leave at four and had just lined up to board when the gate agent announced an hour delay.

Uh-oh, I thought. It wasn’t that I had to be home by a certain time. It was that Hugh can’t handle any change of plans. Though the airline might chalk up the delay to bad weather or a maintenance issue, he knows the truth. And the truth is that it’s all my fault.

Come five o’clock, it was announced that, owing to thunderstorms in the New York area, we would now be taking off at seven-thirty.

I didn’t like this any more than anyone else. Still, I kept my disappointment to myself until around six, when they announced that our flight was cancelled. At about the same time, the flights at the gates to the left and the right were cancelled as well. “Should we rent a car?” I asked.

“So, what, you can drive us?” Hugh snapped.

His tan, which brought out his lovely blue eyes and the silver of his hair, made him extra handsome. I’d been going to say as much, but instead I walked away thinking, I can’t deal with you right now. With all the cancelled flights, the first thing to do was to find a nearby hotel. All the choices were bad, but there’s make-your-own-waffles bad and what-are-these-bites-on-my-stomach? bad, so I called the nearest make-your-own-waffles place. When I told Hugh I’d booked us a room, he said that he had a doctor’s appointment the following morning and announced that he would be renting a car and driving—this in a tone that meant, Whatever you do is your own business.

“That’s what I suggested ten minutes ago,” I reminded him. But I was talking to the air. He was halfway to the escalator by then. Enterprise had nothing left on its lot, so while he got in line at Budget I got in line at Hertz, and ceded my spot to him when it turned out to be our only option. While standing beside me, furious, he called our travel agent.

According to my phone, it would take around seven hours to drive to New York, and that was without the heavy rains and possible flooded roads we had been told to expect.

“Are you sure you can drive that long?” I asked Hugh, who has sciatica—also completely my fault, because I control all the nerves in his legs.

“Yes, but you are not doing Duolingo in the car,” he growled. “I mean it, too. One lesson and you and your little flashlight are going to get out and walk the rest of the way. And you will be sitting upright in the front seat, not lying down in the back. Your job is to keep me awake, understand?”

Our travel agent secured us one of the last available cars, and while Hugh filled out the paperwork I studied the crowd around me. Aside from children, most everyone seemed to have at least one tattoo, a lot of them on exposed legs—even people you wouldn’t expect them on, a grandmother, for instance. The withered butterfly on her ankle resembled a crumpled Post-it note. The only person I spotted without one was a young Asian woman who was seated on a bench beside two large knapsacks. She wore black, patterned leggings with a light jacket and was talking to someone on the phone who seemed to be giving her bad news. The woman had a Chinese accent and perfect English grammar. “Excuse me,” I said, after she hung up. “Where are you trying to get to?”

“New York,” she told me. Up close, I saw that she had a stud in her nose and five delicate rings in each ear.

I looked across the room at Hugh. “New York where?”

“Manhattan,” she said. “The Upper East Side.”

“Do you know how to drive a car?” I asked.

She said that she wasn’t great at it but that she did have a license.

“Come with me,” I said. “I’ll get you to the Upper East Side.”

Hugh was still filling out forms. “This is Susan Du,” I told him. “She’ll be riding with us and driving part of the way. Does she need to show her license or anything?”

The look he gave me was not one I had never seen before. That said, it had been a while—not since I’d offered his mother’s Paris apartment to someone I’d met on a train platform. “But he’s a kid,” I’d argued in the young man’s defense. “Think back to when you were his age and how happy this would have made you. And it’s only for six months!”

Had I proposed earlier that we invite someone stranded to come with us to New York, Hugh would have said no. But Susan Du, who had to be at work the next morning, performing a job I did not understand, was so grateful that there was really no way for him to back out. The car we’d been given was massive, with three rows of seats.