Boston serves as the starting point for Helen's drive toward Evanston and, more broadly, for her attempt to become someone other than the person she became in the wake of her marriage to Mike. The city is both a practical obstacle—its roads are difficult to navigate—and the threshold she crosses in setting out on a wild, brave journey.

Geographic Setting and Route

The distance from Boston to Evanston is given as about 1,001 miles, a drive of roughly fifteen hours according to Google. Helen had hoped to leave before sunrise, but the scale of the route makes clear that even an uninterrupted trip would consume a full day. In Boston, the journey begins not with open road but with the demands of departure planning.

As Helen and Jake make their way out of the city, she concentrates on navigating Boston's complicated roads and roundabouts while Jake reads his whale book. The city's layout recalls Mike's joke that its roads seemed to have been designed by ferrets. The reported joke gives the setting a wry domestic association, even as Mike's absence registers in Helen's thoughts as the unfamiliarity of calling him her ex-husband.

The Delayed Departure

Helen wanted to have Pickle settled with Duncan the night before so she could leave early and reach Evanston soon enough for a good visit with Grandma GiGi. The plan depended on taking Pickle to the vet for boarding, however, and Helen had to wait for the vet to open. That practical delay disrupts the schedule she had wanted and postpones the departure she had carefully arranged.

The intended visit gives the drive a personal destination beyond simply getting home. Grandma GiGi had raised Helen and Duncan after their mother lost interest in them. Helen remembers her grandmother with open affection, including the distinctive bun she wore with chopsticks in it. The hope of seeing her soon helps explain why Helen wanted to make the long drive quickly.

A Point of Departure

Boston is also where the trip's emotional purpose comes into focus. As the city recedes, Helen recognizes that Mike is the reason for the journey, though she is not fleeing him so much as the self she had become after their marriage. The familiar sorrow of the past year remains present; divorce has not made her grief vanish simply because other women describe their own divorces as liberating.

Helen instead frames the journey as an effort to do something wild, brave, and stupefying. She has settled on a survival course without being entirely sure why, but the uncertainty is part of the change she seeks. Boston therefore anchors the contrast between her constrained recent past and the risky undertaking ahead: leaving the city is the first concrete movement in an attempt at self-reinvention.

Narrative Role

The opening drive turns Boston into a threshold setting rather than a destination in its own right. Its distance from Evanston supplies the journey with measurable scale, while the complicated navigation and wait for Pickle's boarding make departure imperfect from the outset. The contrast between Helen's careful logistics and her larger, less certain desire for change gives the city its narrative significance: it is the point from which an ordinary drive begins to carry the weight of a new life.