A Window Opens: A Novel Read Free

scratched, it looked like the loading dock at a grocery store. We’d been saving up for a renovation.
    “But at least you can stay at the firm until you find a new job, right?”
    “No, that’s another thing.”
    “What?” I envisioned sand pouring through a sieve: vacations, restaurant dinners, movies, a new car, college savings, retirement— every iota of security spilling out and away.
    “Alice, I can’t stay there.”
    “What do you mean you can’t stay there?”
    “Oh, come on. You know how it is. ‘Up or out.’ ” Nicholas’s shoulders slumped and I rubbed his back in wide circles, as I did when one of the kids threw up on the floor in the middle of the night. It’s okay. It’s okay . He unbuttoned the top button of his shirt with a defeated air. “Now that I have this information, I really need to move on. It would be humiliating to stay—I’m a dead man walking.”
    I pictured Nicholas in an orange prison jumpsuit, shackled at the ankles and cuffed at the wrists. “I get that.”
    “So, I’ve been thinking—and this isn’t the first time it’s crossed my mind—now might be the time to hang out a shingle. Bring in my own clients; run my own show.”
    “Really?”
    “Really.” Nicholas leaned over the sink, turned it on full blast, and threw water at his face in little cupped handfuls. Then he turned back to me with glistening cheeks, shiny droplets clinging to his eyebrows. He looked ashamed instead of refreshed. “Alice, I have to tell you, I didn’t react well to the news.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean . . .” Now Nicholas opened the fridge and grabbed a bottle of beer. After he flicked off the cap, he lifted it by its brown neck and tilted the bottom in my direction in a gesture that telegraphed both “What haveI got to lose?” and “Here’s looking at you.” I raised an invisible bottle of my own, although my mood was anything but celebratory. Even though he was a borderline teetotaler, I didn’t need to be told that this wasn’t Nicholas’s first beer of the morning.
    “Yes?”
    “I lost it when Win told me I wasn’t going to make partner.”
    “Lost it . . . how?”
    “I threw my laptop across the room.” He crossed his arms and closed his eyes briefly, as if to block out the reality of what he was saying, which was horrifying and surreal. An angry Nicholas was a silent Nicholas, icily folding laundry or staring straight ahead at the road for hours while driving. In all our years together, I’d never seen him throw anything except a ball and once, when we took a pottery class together, a tragically misshapen bowl.
    “Wait . . . what? I’m sorry. Did you just say you threw your laptop across the room ?” My mind flashed on the possibility of having my own beer, but I thought the better of it—the last thing I wanted to do was arrive at school pickup with alcohol on my breath. A spark like that could ignite a firestorm of gossip whose fug would follow me for years; I’d seen it with a mom who was spotted at the Scholastic book fair with a tiny bottle of something in her satchel purse. It could have been hand lotion or hair spray (this being New Jersey, after all), but the die was cast. The woman was never invited to be a class parent again.
    Nicholas fiddled with the refrigerator magnets, arranging the unused alphabet letters in a little line at the top of the freezer door. QPITZLSF. “Yes, I threw my laptop across the room. But we were in a conference room, and there was a lot of space. And the laptop was closed, so . . . well, I guess that doesn’t make it any better, but at least it didn’t shatter.”
    “That’s something.” No mess to clean up, no injuries. Still, I felt a little light-headed. I closed my eyes and pressed my index fingers onto their lids until I saw orange kaleidoscope patterns.
    “Yeah, I guess.”
    “Did it . . . make a lot of noise?”
    Nicholas looked sheepish. “Yes.”
    “Well. At least . . .