A Window Opens: A Novel Read Free Page A

you’re going out with a bang?”
    We both laughed, halfheartedly. Nicholas tilted his head back and took a long swig from his beer. His neck looked smooth and young; he might have been twenty, pounding a Natty Light in the office of the college newspaper.
    “Glen—remember him from my basketball team?”
    “Yeah?”
    “He has space I can rent in North Caldwell. I think I might have a few clients who would jump ship, and I’ve been coming up with ideas for bringing in new ones. I want to give it a whirl.”
    “Wow. Nicholas! You’ve really thought this through.” I didn’t believe this, not for a minute. Nicholas and I are hardly models of perfect communication, but we keep each other in the loop when it comes to major decisions.
    “I guess. I won’t miss the commute, or feeling like a minion all the time. But it’ll take a while to get up and running. That’s what scares me.”
    “Are you worried that you’ve burned a bridge?” (I really wanted to say: Aren’t you worried these people will think you are out of your mind ?)
    “Maybe? But for me that was a bridge to nowhere.”
    We were quiet for a minute, both standing there like characters on a movie set. I knew what my line was and I delivered it without hesitation: “Nicholas, we’ll make it work.”
    “I know. I’m sure it will turn out to be a good thing, I just—”
    “It’s already a good thing. Nobody should have to stay in a place where they want to throw something across a room. We’re going to figure this out. I’ll find a new job. Full time. We’ll survive.”
    I tried to sound cheerful, game for anything, but the truth is, I was petrified. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to up the ante on the work front. Our kids were still little. I loved my part-time job at You magazine. I worried that it would take years for Nicholas to start his own firm and that he was now unemployable thanks to this understandable but completely uncharacteristic violent outburst in his past.
    Nicholas unthreaded his cufflinks—little elastic knots that he had in every color of the rainbow. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea.”
    “Which part?”
    “You working full-time.”
    And just like that, the page turned. We wereon to a new chapter.
    •  •  •
    At bedtime, Georgie picked Sylvester and the Magic Pebble , which I can read with my eyes closed. Normally, it’s only the two of us for stories; Oliver and Margot like to read to themselves in their own rooms. But tonight they were shoehorning their bodies into Georgie’s single bed by the time I finished the first line: “Sylvester Duncan lived with his mother and father on Acorn Road in Oatsdale.”
    If March is the fillet of the calendar, this is the fillet of parenthood: that one, brief part of the day when lunchboxes are unpacked, bickering is suspended, and everyone smells like toothpaste. Margot didn’t move away when my thumb found the cleft in her chin, and I didn’t flinch when Oliver’s bony shoulder wedged painfully into my spleen. Georgie pulled her knees underneath her stretchy Tinker Bell nightgown and sidled further up the bed to make more space.

2
    N icholas and I have been married for thirteen years. We met when we were freshmen at our tiny arty/crunchy college in Vermont; in fact, he was one of the very first people I met on my first day there. My roommate and I were lugging her baby-blue futon up the stairs to the fifth floor when the door opened on the second-floor landing, and a smart-looking boy with circular wire-rim glasses stepped through. He asked if we needed help. We did.
    We didn’t start dating—insofar as people “date” in college—until senior year, when I was an editor of the college newspaper and Nicholas was one of my writers. He stopped by the newspaper offices on a night when we were “putting the issue to bed”— how I loved the urgency and insiderness of this expression—and took me to task for excising the word elephantine from an article he’d