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  When we come inside, Julia tries to convince us to go back to her house. Justin and Skip are hanging out with the kids and are probably knocking back a few drinks of their own.

  I beg off even though it’s only nine o’clock. The babysitter has brought the kids home and they’re upstairs taking showers. I’d have no one to watch them, and I’m tired and looking forward to relaxing with a DVD after I get them in bed.

  Julia stands and sways slightly as she pours the last of the chardonnay into her glass. She makes her way through my kitchen, sipping the wine, and heads toward the front door. “I’ll bring your glass back tomorrow, Claire,” she says over her shoulder. But she won’t. I always have to retrieve them.

  Elisa pecks me on the cheek and gathers her things. “Thanks, Claire. I’ll see you later. Bye, Bridget.” She hurries out and I know it’s because she wants to follow Julia and make sure she gets home okay.

  Bridget yawns. This morning’s caffeine boost has been eclipsed by the sedating effects of a few beers and the cumulative fatigue brought about by a day’s worth of parenting.

  “See you tomorrow at seven?” I ask as I walk her out.

  She leans over and gives me a quick hug. “Sure. Thanks for hosting.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  It takes me fifteen minutes to clean up the kitchen and the deck after I tuck the kids into bed. Before I head upstairs to slip between my own sheets, I check my e-mail.

  To: Claire Canton

  From: Chris Canton

  Subject: Kids

  I got your message. Tell the kids I’m sorry I missed them—I was on a conference call, but it was nice to hear their voices on the recording. Busy day tomorrow. I’ll try to check in when I get back to the hotel. Closed the deal in Albuquerque. Hope I can do the same in Santa Fe.

  7

  claire

  When we returned home from Hawaii last year, the first month of Chris’s unemployment was almost behind us. Our lives didn’t seem that different, because even though he was home all the time, he never stopped working. Idleness was a foreign concept to Chris, and he spent his days fixing things around the house and offering to drive the kids to their playdates and after-school practices. He worked tirelessly in the yard, planting trees and building a large retaining wall, which he landscaped with shrubs and rosebushes.

  He was confident that the headhunters who fawned all over him would soon call to tell him they’d located the next lucrative position, complete with a sign-on bonus and six weeks of vacation time. This mind-set didn’t come from a place of entitlement, and Chris certainly didn’t take the recession lightly, but there were sectors of the economy that were still performing well and he thought it was only a matter of time before the headhunters found a company that needed a proven sales leader, pairing them like the matching cards in a giant game of employment concentration. Patience isn’t one of Chris’s stronger virtues, but he waited, and though he got a bit quieter, pensive, and slightly brooding, I don’t think anyone noticed but me.

  School let out and in the months that followed, Chris volunteered to coach Josh’s summer baseball league and shuttle Jordan back and forth to her swimming lessons while I spent the days appeasing my clients. For the first time ever I had the freedom to take on additional work and more challenging projects. I didn’t have to drop everything in time to meet the school bus or run someone to practice or facilitate a playdate.

  Frequent monitoring of our bank account showed more money going out than we’d planned for. The premiums for our health insurance were so high it barely seemed legal, Chris’s car needed four new tires, and our dentist referred us to an orthodontist who informed us of the costly treatment Jordan would need to correct a problem that was invisible to the untrained eye. “We can postpone it,” I suggested.

  Chris wouldn’t even consider it. “No,” he said. “If she needs it, we’ll do it now.”

  He came home one day and found me mopping the kitchen floor. “Why don’t you let Kathy do that?” he said, referring to our bimonthly cleaning lady.

  I dunked the mop in the bucket and then squeezed out the excess water. “I let her go,” I said. I felt horrible about it because she was a single parent and really needed the money. “I told her I’d call her back when our budget eases up a little.”

  Chris wouldn’t look at me, or maybe I was the one who avoided his eyes, afraid to see any kind of hurt in them. “Our budget is fine,” Chris said softly. He skipped dinner that night and spent the evening in our home office with the door closed.

  I took on additional clients, and I hustled for more, following up on every lead I encountered. Sometimes I worked until midnight but even then Chris would stay up later, and it was around this time that he stopped coming to bed altogether, preferring the couch so he wouldn’t disrupt my sleep with his restlessness. I slept worse without him next to me, but I refrained from complaining so I wouldn’t add to his stress.

  One night in August, after I tucked the kids into bed, I found Chris in the office with a calculator and the checkbook on the desktop in front of him, fingers flying over the numbers, his brow furrowed.

  “We’ll be dipping into our savings by winter,” Chris said, shaking his head. He exhaled and massaged his temples.

  The money he had received in one lump sum equaled eight months of his base salary but didn’t include the commissions he once earned. Though we didn’t have any revolving debt we paid a small fortune to our mortgage company every month. The irony was that the home Chris and I were once so proud of had lost a significant amount of its value when property values plummeted; we probably couldn’t unload it if we wanted to, and we would lose money even if we found a buyer.

  “I’m taking on more work than ever,” I said. “If you weren’t here to help me with the kids, I’d never have had the ability to bid for these jobs, and there’s no way I would have had the time to devote to them.”

  “Well, that makes me feel so much better,” he said, sighing, not bothering to hide the defeat in his voice.

  I’d always thought we were equal partners, but my normally open-minded husband apparently harbored some fairly strong 1950s opinions about who should be bringing home the bacon and who should fry it up in the pan. Or maybe it was just his wounded ego that was feeling old-fashioned.

  I left the room, trying my best not to crush the eggshells under my feet.

  8

  daniel

  Dylan’s in town. He sends me a text and asks me to meet him for a drink, so when my shift ends I go home and change out of my uniform. When I walk into the bar he’s sitting on a stool, whiskey in hand, shooting the shit with the bartender. I can’t even imagine what he’s saying; the possibilities are endless.

  “Hey,” I say when I slide onto the stool next to him. “When did you get into town?” I signal the bartender to bring me the same thing Dylan is drinking.

  “Couple hours ago,” he says. He takes a drink of his whiskey. “You shoot anybody today?” It’s an old, worn-out joke. One Dylan never tires of. His jab at my profession. Ironic, considering he refuses to choose one of his own.

  I let it go. “Nope.” The bartender sets down my drink. “How long are you sticking around?”

  “Not long. I’m just passing through.”

  He needs a haircut and his wrinkled clothes tell me he’s probably crashing on someone’s couch and living out of a duffel bag. I take too big a drink and the whiskey burns a bit on its way down. “You see Mom and Dad yet?”

  “I told you I just got here.”

  “You should have gone there first.” I don’t know why I think that’s even a possibility. Dylan goes where he wants to. “They miss you.”

  “What do you hear from Jessie these days?” he asks.

  “I don’t.” It’s just like Dylan to mention the one thing he knows I don’t want to talk about. The thing I’ve failed at. I take another d
rink, wondering why I even bothered to come. “Mom worries about you. She called me the other day. Said she couldn’t get a hold of you.”

  “I’ll try to get over there before I leave.”

  “You do that, Dylan.” I stand up, throw some money on the bar, and walk out.

  My empty house greets me when I return home. I turn on the lights and throw my keys and phone on the coffee table. Click on the TV and surf the channels. Around 10:00 P.M. my phone rings. I answer and Melissa asks the same question she always does, her voice low and inviting.

  “Want some company?”

  My house seems emptier than it usually does, and I don’t feel like being alone tonight, so I say, “Sure. Come on over.”

  She arrives twenty minutes later, and she smiles when I open the door. We don’t speak, but I step aside and when she walks through the door I follow her down the hallway to my bedroom.

  9

  claire

  Chris flies out of the Kansas City International Airport every Monday morning and returns on Thursday night, spending Fridays in his office at the company’s headquarters. He’s now the director of sales for a large software development company, and from what little he’s shared with me, the culture sounds dreadful. “It’s ridiculously competitive,” Chris said, shortly after starting, but the tone of his voice made me think he was more than a little excited about the challenge.

  Even when he’s not at work he is always working, sitting on the couch with his laptop or in the office with the door closed. He’s on the phone a lot, too. Once he walked into the kitchen and I thought he was talking to me, so I answered. But when he turned his head and I saw the Bluetooth headset I realized he wasn’t talking to me at all.

  He gets in late bearing overpriced souvenirs—small stuffed animals for Jordan and unique gadgets or toys for Josh—purchased mostly from airport gift shops. In the two short months he’s been back to work he’s been elevated to the preferred parent, and I’ve become mean Mommy, the one that makes the kids eat their vegetables and go to bed on time.

  “This is a bad habit to start,” I warned Chris, but I know why he does it. I wanted to tell him that Josh and Jordan are too young to hold a grudge, and that their memories of the last year are already fading. Kids are remarkably resilient. More so than their parents, apparently.

  He had to travel an extra day this week and we were asleep when he got home last night. The kids’ summer vacation is in full swing and when Chris called from the airport he promised them a trip to the water park in Kansas City. The sun shines bright on this Saturday morning at the end of June, and the predicted high of eighty-five makes it a perfect day for careening down waterslides and splashing around in a wave pool.

  Chris walks into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. Josh puts a forkful of waffles and sausage into his mouth. “Are you still gonna take us to the water park, Dad?” he asks, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and taking a large drink of his orange juice.

  I hand him a napkin. “Finish chewing next time,” I say.

  “Yep,” Chris says. He heads toward the coffee pot and pours a cup, then sits down at the table and yawns. Jordan smiles and Chris reaches over and tweaks her nose. “How’s my baby girl this morning?”

  “I’m good, Daddy,” she says, smiling. She finishes her breakfast and climbs into Chris’s lap, throwing her arms around him in a spontaneous hug.

  He holds her tight and says, “Aw, thank you.”

  “If you’re done eating, put your plates in the sink,” I say.

  “Can we change into our swimsuits?” Josh asks, barely able to contain his excitement.

  “It’s a little early yet, but go ahead.” They tear out of the room, eager to get this show on the road.

  “I can’t go with you today,” I tell Chris. “I’m putting the finishing touches on a big project and it’s due by noon. I was supposed to turn it in yesterday, but I asked for an extension so I could take the kids to the zoo.” Thankfully, my client understood; she’s a working mom, too.

  “That’s okay,” he says. “We’ll be fine.”

  Chris is more than capable of handling this outing alone, but since he started traveling we’ve lapsed into tag-team parenting, which means the kids spend plenty of time with each of us individually, but we spend very little time together as a family. I add this development to the long list of worries I already have.

  “You don’t need to work so much now, you know,” Chris adds.

  Oh, the irony.

  “I’m not accepting that many new projects,” I say. “This one is just time sensitive.” I don’t explain to Chris that my desire to scale back has more to do with the kids being home this summer than any desire to curtail my workload; I plan on adding as many projects as I can handle when school starts again. I like the independence and the satisfaction of earning an income, and there’s a small part of me that also thinks I might like the idea of a safety net. That if I’m ever truly alone I’ll be able to stand on my own two feet.

  “I’m going to get my oil changed and do the grocery shopping,” I say. “I’ll drop off your suits at the cleaner’s.”

  Chris nods, running his fingers through sleep-tousled hair. “Okay,” he says. “Thanks.” There are shadows under his eyes and I’d tell him to get more sleep, but he won’t listen. “Can you refill my prescription while you’re out?” he asks.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, so quietly I can hardly hear him. “I’m just not ready to stop taking the pills yet.”

  “Chris, it’s okay. Really.” Besides, what can I say? I’m the one who insisted on the antidepressant in the first place. I top off his coffee cup and give his shoulder a squeeze. He reaches up and grabs my hand, squeezes back. It’s the first touch I’ve received from him in months.

  When Chris and the kids leave for the water park I buckle down and finish my work, then head out to begin my errands. I finish the grocery shopping quickly, amazed at how much I can accomplish when I’m not dragging two squabbling kids along. After dropping off the groceries at home, I get my oil changed, deal with the dry cleaning, fill the prescription, and then pull into the Starbucks next door. I order an iced latte, sipping it at one of the shaded outdoor tables. The marquee for a nearby movie theater catches my eye. My family won’t be home for hours, so I wander over and buy a ticket for Sex and the City 2; I’ve been dying to see it. My mood instantly improves when I find a seat in the half-empty theater, the air-conditioning a welcome contrast to the rising temperature and the blazing afternoon sunshine.

  I love going to the movies; I always have. There’s nothing quite like the anticipation of the story that’s about to be played out on the big screen. I’ve never been to a movie by myself before, but once the lights go down and the previews start, I wonder why I waited so long.

  That’s where Chris and I met back in 1998, sitting next to each other in a movie theater when we were twenty-two years old. Kendra, a girlfriend I’d met during my internship and that I still kept in contact with, had called me up late that afternoon. “A bunch of us are getting together to see There’s Something About Mary tonight. Are you interested?”

  It was August. I’d moved into my own apartment after graduation, a cute studio in a quiet neighborhood that was within a few miles of my first postcollege, full-time job. I had no one to help me if my blood sugar got too low or too high, so managing my diabetes became more important than ever. It made my parents nervous and they tried to talk me out of it, but I’d looked forward to having my own place, relishing the thought of peace and quiet after the noise and chaos of the three friends I had roomed with for the past two years. I craved independence and wanted to prove to my parents—and myself—that I could live on my own. It wasn’t until after I moved in and spent the first few nights alone that I realized how much I missed those girls and their constant companionship. The company I worked f
or was also very small, and even though I enjoyed preparing visual presentations for a handful of clients, it was quite solitary compared to the large groups I’d worked with on school projects.

  So when Kendra called I said yes immediately, jumping at the chance to surround myself with people and noise and get out of the studio apartment that had once seemed so perfect and quaint and now just seemed lonely and claustrophobic. “Great. I’ll pick you up in an hour,” she said.

  We met the rest of the group outside the theater, and I noticed him right away. He stood off to the side a bit, this perfect boy with blue eyes and blond hair, wearing khaki pants and a white polo shirt, as if he eschewed everything about the slovenly, multipierced, and tattooed student body he’d recently left behind. He looked like he didn’t belong and he also looked as if he couldn’t care less about things like that. I’d eventually find out that he had been way too busy holding down two part-time jobs and earning straight As to worry about what others thought of him. I realized I’d been staring and looked away quickly, but not before noticing that he seemed to be looking at me, too.

  When we were standing in line to buy tickets, Kendra told me—when I inquired, casually, as if I really didn’t care—that he was the former roommate of someone in the group. There were seven of us and we bought popcorn and found seats in the theater, and somehow he ended up sitting right next to me.

  He introduced himself. “Hi, I’m Chris.”

  “Claire,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand. “It’s nice to meet you.” Clean-shaven and clear-eyed, he lacked the run-down, bloodshot, hard-partying look my previous boyfriend had worn like a badge of honor. I had dated Logan for almost a year but we parted ways when it became clear that I had neither the stamina nor the desire to keep up with him. I had no interest in abusing my body the way so many of my peers did; I had enough to worry about without taking additional risks. I overheard Logan tell a friend one time, “Claire’s hot, but she has issues.” He was probably referring to the time my blood sugar dropped too low. I got shaky and started sweating and luckily I had glucose tablets within reach because he was no help whatsoever. Logan would have freaked out if he’d seen me during a severe low, because it isn’t pretty. I say random things. I sweat profusely, and I cry. I can become belligerent pretty easily. Though Logan never came right out and said it, I always felt as if my diabetes—and my need to follow a strict schedule—put a damper on his spontaneous ways. My disease was manageable, but it required vigilant monitoring and making sure that insulin was readily available. Logan thought nothing of road-tripping two hundred miles to see a concert with only an hour’s notice and he felt more at home in a smoky bar, tossing back shots of Jäger, than he ever did in a darkened movie theater. The stress of trying to fit into his world and the ups and downs of my blood sugar became something I started to hide around him, and I had enough sense to know that it wasn’t a good sign. I ended the relationship a short time later and was more than a little heartbroken when he didn’t seem to care.