Elisa’s husband is one of my favorite people. He played football at Baylor, and he’s a big strapping guy with broad shoulders and a belly that’s just beginning to show the effects of too much beer and barbecue, but he’s a teddy bear. I once watched him dodge traffic to rescue a turtle so it wouldn’t get run over, and I saw him wipe away tears when ten-year-old Travis—his and Elisa’s only child—accepted an award for collecting donations for a family who lost all their possessions in a house fire. And boy does he love his wife.
Skip sets me down and then shakes Chris’s hand, clapping him on the back. “How’s the job going, man?”
I tense up, forgetting for a moment that this question is preferable to “Have you found a job yet?” which is what everyone wanted to know for the twelve months Chris didn’t have one. Chris answers that it’s only been a month but so far things are going well, then ambles off in search of a beer, oblivious to the blip on my emotional radar. Oblivious of me entirely.
I survey the group on the patio. Julia and Justin, who live behind me and Chris, are sitting next to each other holding drinks. Justin has a beer while Julia clenches her customary glass of chardonnay; I won’t know until I talk to her how many she’s already had at home. Bridget and Sam and their brood, who live next door to us, our houses so close I can sometimes smell what Bridget’s cooking for dinner if the windows are open, have yet to arrive. They’re perpetually late; the wrangling of four boys, each born eighteen months after the last, is such a daunting task that they’ve mostly given up. “We’ll be there when we get there,” Bridget likes to say.
Justin has registered our arrival, and his eyes linger on me a bit too long. He rises from his chair and walks toward me, handing me the can of Diet 7Up he plucked from the cooler on the way. “Hey, Claire,” he says, kissing me on the cheek, eyes scanning leisurely from head to toe. “You look great.”
I doubt my shorts and tank top will win any fashion contests, but I smile and open the can of pop. “Thanks.” This one-sided flirtation, which first developed at Elisa and Skip’s Christmas party when Justin complimented my dress and then, after having way too much to drink, gave me a kiss under the mistletoe that was definitely outside the parameters of acceptable neighbor behavior, has chugged along harmlessly since December. His confidence in his own appearance borders on arrogance, and I doubt he’s ever been turned down in his life. But there are many reasons I’d never open that can of worms, not the least of which is my friendship with Julia. It’s nice to be noticed, though.
Justin gives me a knowing grin and then drifts off to join the men clustered near the grill. Skip takes the platter Elisa hands him and begins slapping burgers and hot dogs down on the grate. The smell of charcoal and sizzling beef fills the air. The husbands stand around watching the meat cook, drinking their beer, while the wives congregate on the patio. Even after all this time, our teen years far behind us, the boys are still across the room from the girls.
I sit down next to Julia and do a quick scan of the yard. Josh and Jordan have moved on from the trampoline and are playing freeze tag with Travis while Julia’s daughters are sipping juice boxes and playing with their Polly Pockets. Elisa drops into a chair next to me and opens a beer. “Do you need help with anything?” I ask.
She tucks a tendril of hair behind her ear and exhales. “Nope. Skip’s handling the meat and everything else is ready. I just want to sit for a minute.”
Julia swivels toward us. “I have big news,” she says. Her eyes are glassy and her words are clipped, but she’s not slurring. Two glasses at home, I’d say. Generous pours. Julia weighs all of one hundred and five pounds and can’t hold her wine at all, though not for lack of trying. Her brown hair is cut in a sleek, chin-length bob that frames her pretty face, and her blue baby-doll dress brings out the color of her eyes. But her skin is starting to show the effects of daily alcohol consumption, flushed or sallow depending on whether she’s drunk or hungover, and she always looks tired.
Julia pauses for dramatic effect and then says, “Justin and I are putting in a pool. It’s a bit late in the season—we really should have gotten the ball rolling in the spring—but Justin’s big commission finally came through, so we decided to go for it.” Justin is some kind of commercial real estate whiz, and I can’t help but be impressed that he’s still able to do so well in this economy. We listen as Julia shares the pool’s dimensions and the fact that there will be not one but two waterfalls. Construction will begin immediately, and if everything goes according to schedule, they’ll be jumping off the diving board by the end of July.
Elisa, the eternal hostess, asks all the right follow-up questions and Julia prattles on, enjoying the spotlight, but then she stops suddenly and pulls a bottle—no, actually it’s a jug—of cheap chardonnay out of the cooler and tops off her glass, concentrating on not spilling a drop. The fact that her next drink has so quickly replaced her enthusiasm about the pool worries me more than a little.
Bridget, looking harried, finally arrives with her four boys, but Sam does not accompany them and I wonder if we’ll be graced with his presence at all; I can’t remember the last time I saw him.
Skip calls out that the meat is done and everyone lines up. I make sure Josh and Jordan eat something other than potato chips and add some fruit and baby carrots to their plates. Justin brings me another Diet 7Up, smiling and popping the top before handing it to me.
After dinner I coat my children in a heavy cloud of bug spray, which they protest against. Loudly. “You’ll thank me tomorrow when you’re not covered in mosquito bites,” I tell them. “We’ll make s’mores and light sparklers in a little while, okay?” I send them off to play with the rest of the kids.
Fourteen-year-old Sebastian, Bridget’s oldest, has become our de facto DJ, and the iPod blasts a variety of tunes, everything from Skip’s classic country to Elisa’s adult contemporary and Travis’s hip-hop.
Chris stands in the yard next to Skip and Justin. The smell of cigar smoke permeates the air, and their laughter mingles with the music. It’s nice to see Chris with a smile on his face, even if it isn’t for me. He’s gained back a little of the weight he lost and his shorts don’t look so baggy anymore. His body language—shoulders back, head held a bit higher than before—tells me he’s feeling a little better about himself. Watching Chris interact with the other men is bittersweet. Six months ago he might have stayed home, but now that he’s here I can’t help but wonder how he can effortlessly return to the way things were with his friends yet find it so difficult to get into some kind of groove with me.
The sun sets, and Justin finds me on the patio. He sits down in the chair Julia vacated when she went in to use the restroom. He says something, but I can’t hear him over the music. Leaning over, he brushes my hair out of the way and says, “Julia won’t mind if I take her chair.” His lips graze my ear, and his fingers trail down my neck, unnoticed in the darkness.
I’ve known Justin for two years, ever since he and Julia moved into the neighborhood, and he’s never paid this much attention to me before. Can men sense when a woman is sexually frustrated? Maybe it’s like those high-pitched whistles only dogs can hear.
Justin looks up when Julia comes back outside, but he doesn’t move away. I fidget and check to make sure my body language isn’t giving either of them the wrong idea; I don’t want Julia to think I’m remotely interested in her husband. Then again, she doesn’t appear to be all that observant right now. She trips and I’m embarrassed for her, so I don’t say anything. She sits down next to me. “What’s going on?” She’s slurring a bit and has the hiccups. I don’t say anything about that, either. Justin pretends not to notice any of this, though how he can ignore it I’m not sure. “Do you want some water?” I ask, as the hiccupping sends her into a fit of giggles.
“Nope,” she says, with the cheerful disposition of someone who has bypassed buzzed and is heading full speed toward blissfully wasted.
>
Julia never used to act this way, but in the last year her drinking has increased dramatically. I’m certain there’s a reason, something it can be attributed to. None of us are doing her any favors by pretending not to notice, and someone really needs to say something. I vote for Justin. Maybe he’s already tried.
Elisa brings out marshmallows, chocolate bars, and graham crackers, and Skip threads the marshmallows onto skewers and toasts them over the grill. The music is way too loud, and Bridget tells Sebastian to turn it down, threatening him with his life if he so much as glances at the volume dial on the iPod. “Where did you say Sam is?” Elisa asks when Bridget plunks herself down in the nearest chair.
“At the track.” She shrugs. “Or the casino. I don’t know. Does it matter?” Bridget glances over to where Chris is helping the kids with their sparklers, making sure they put the burned out ones in a metal bucket so no one will step on them. She watches as Skip hands Chris a skewer and he slides off the toasted marshmallow and sandwiches it between a chocolate bar and a graham cracker, handing it to whoever is next in line.
“I wish Sam was more like Chris,” she says.
No, you don’t.
But Bridget can’t see the forest for the trees and doesn’t realize there’s a big difference between a good father and a good husband, and she probably doesn’t care. Greener grass and all that. She doesn’t know the mess Chris and I have made of our marriage. Neither does Julia. Elisa is the only one I share my secrets with. I’ve worked hard to keep the facade of this marriage, this life, intact, but only to avoid becoming fodder for the neighborhood gossip mill.
Frankly, I’m exhausted.
It’s late. We gather up our children, who are tired and sticky with marshmallows and chocolate, and say our good-byes.
We’re the Cantons. Sun-kissed, all-American, picture-perfect. By all appearances, we’re the ideal suburban family.
As long as you don’t look too closely.
2
chris
On Monday morning, I stop for coffee on the way to the airport. The line for the drive-through at Starbucks reaches clear around the building and tapping impatiently on the steering wheel does nothing to make it move faster. I take a deep breath and remind myself that I’ve allowed plenty of time to get to the airport, and I’m in no danger of missing my flight.
Stopping at this Starbucks has become part of my new routine, and worrying about my rapidly increasing caffeine consumption accomplishes nothing, so I don’t. I don’t let myself worry about all this travel, either. I didn’t have any choice. Claire understands; she gave me her blessing. Reluctantly, but still. The kids, though. That’s another story. I try my best not to think about it.
I’m grateful to be able to spend one day at company headquarters, but my cube’s chest-high walls provide zero privacy. I loathe open-plan offices, but a lot of the big software companies have embraced it like it’s the next big thing. Whoever said it was better for company morale and collaboration has never tried to get anything done. The constant interruptions are a productivity killer, at least for me, which is why I don’t arrive at the office earlier than 8:00 A.M. on Fridays; I get more done at home.
I miss my old company, which had one thousand fewer employees than this one. I miss my old office, with its four real walls and a door that closed.
I miss my kids and my house, and even though she probably wouldn’t believe me if I told her so, I miss Claire.
I miss a lot of things.
3
daniel
Traffic is light on the parkway a little after 10:00 A.M. on Monday morning. Drivers who aren’t speeding slow down anyway, and the ones who are going too fast slam on their brakes when they notice my police car in their rearview mirrors. I pull them over and listen to the same worn-out excuses before I write them a ticket. A man wearing a three-piece suit and driving a BMW rolls his eyes and mutters under his breath when I hand over the citation for speeding. I stand there until he looks at me. “Slow down,” I say, and I don’t smile when I say it.
The next car I pull over has a woman behind the wheel. She gets pissy almost immediately, exhaling loudly and glancing at her watch like I’ve ruined her morning on purpose. “Do you have any idea how fast you were going, ma’am?” My guess is no, because using her rearview mirror to apply her makeup and talking on the phone probably used up all her awareness. “The speed limit on this stretch is fifty-five. I clocked you going seventy.”
She opens her mouth, ready to protest, but then hands me the documents I asked for and sighs loudly. “I’m going to be late,” she says. She pulls a lipstick out of her purse and goes to town on her mouth as I walk back to my car.
I patrol the parkway until lunchtime and then pull into Subway to grab a sandwich and a Coke to take back to the station. Later I’ll head toward the suburbs, hoping that it’s quiet and that there are no unpleasant surprises waiting for me, like a missing child or a domestic dispute.
I think back to the woman I pulled over the other day. The pretty blonde in the SUV with a burned-out taillight. I remember her smile and how nice she was.
And how for the rest of my shift I kept picturing her face because she reminded me so much of Jessie.
4
claire
I’m dusting the built-in bookcases in the family room when the rumble of construction machinery, so loud and foreign in my neighborhood, startles me. I look out the window, in the direction of Justin and Julia’s backyard, which abuts mine, and spot a bright yellow excavator fifty yards away. The man operating the controls lowers the bucket and metal slams into dirt. They’re digging the hole for the swimming pool today.
I run my cloth over a picture of Josh and Jordan, set it down, and then smile when I pick up a hand-carved wooden sculpture Chris and I bought on the beach in Hawaii a month after he lost his job. The trip had been his idea. He bookmarked the websites for several resorts and asked me to pick one. “I may never have time off like this again, Claire,” he said. “When I start a new job I might not be able to get away for a while.” That was back when he thought it would be only a matter of weeks before he found another job. Before either of us knew just how bad things would get.
I’d been begging him for years to take a vacation, and it would be only the second time we’d gone away by ourselves since Josh and Jordan were born. My mom and dad took the kids for a week while we drank margaritas and swam in the ocean. We walked on the beach holding hands, and spent hours having vacation-caliber sex in the giant king-size bed in our room. If unemployment bothered Chris, he didn’t let on, at least not then and not to me.
The expense of a vacation didn’t worry him at all. If he found a job right away, he’d be pulling in a double income due to the eight months of severance pay his employer had agreed to pay him. We had no debt other than the house, a healthy balance in savings, retirement accounts that we told ourselves not to worry about because they’d certainly recover when the economy turned around, and college funds for the kids. On paper, we looked pretty good. I was also employed. Granted, my freelance graphic design projects didn’t bring in a tenth as much as Chris’s lucrative commissions had, but it supplemented our income nicely and I was able to work from home. More importantly, I enjoyed it.
We were also able to extend our health insurance benefits for eighteen months, albeit it at a very steep price. That was the only thing that really worried me back then. I’m a type 1 diabetic—I was diagnosed at age twelve—and without health insurance my disease could severely derail our careful financial planning. I wear an insulin pump, which greatly improves my quality of life, but it doesn’t come cheap. There are frequent doctor visits to my endocrinologist and medical supplies that must be purchased each month. We had eighteen months before those benefits would run out.
Plenty of time.
It wasn’t like the downsizing had come as a complete shock, either. It was May 2009
and we’d spent the better part of the previous year listening to the nightly news reports of the plunging stock market and the housing bubble bursting in front of everyone’s eyes. The experts claimed the recession was coming to an end, but the lingering effects of high unemployment could plague the nation for months—maybe years—to come. We knew lots of people who had already lost their jobs and it seemed that everywhere we went someone was networking, leaving no stone unturned when it came to ferreting out a job lead.
The privately owned software company Chris worked for held on as long as they could, but they’d expanded quickly and relied too heavily on external funding and product revenue. Drowning in debt, they laid off their employees in waves, first the support staff and then the highest-paid executives. Chris had time to mentally prepare for what was coming. He didn’t know exactly when it would happen, but he knew the sales department would be next. “Then who will sell their product?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Chris said. “No one’s buying it right now and they won’t stay afloat long enough to ride this out. I’ll be surprised if the company is still in business in six months.” In the end, it took only three before they shut their doors for good.
I was sitting at the kitchen table assembling the treat bags for Jordan’s upcoming birthday party—pink cellophane filled to the top with assorted candy—when I heard the garage door go up that day. My first thought was that Chris decided to knock off early, but that was wishful thinking. Chris loves to work and it isn’t in his nature to stop unless he has to. He had held the position of sales manager for eight years, but when he walked into the kitchen holding a cardboard box containing the contents of his office, and a folder outlining the details of his severance package, it didn’t matter that his team—under his relentless guidance—had shattered every prior sales record in the company.
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