Bird in Hand Read Free

a hand over her tummy, unzipped the pants, and callipered a little fat roll with her fingers. She sighed.
    “What?”
    “Oh, nothing,” she said. “Listen, Dolores will feed the kids, you just have to give them a bath. And honey, try not to look at your BlackBerry until you get them in bed. They see so little of you as it is.” She yanked down her pants and, back in the closet, found a more forgiving pair.
    When Alison was finally dressed she felt awkward and unnatural, like a child pretending to be a grown-up, or a character in a play. In her mommy role she wore flat, comfortable shoes, small gold hoops, soft T-shirts, jeans or khakis. Now it felt as if she were wearing a costume: black high-heeled boots, a jangling bracelet, earrings that pulled on her lobes, bright (too bright?) lipstick she’d been pressed into buying at the Bobbi Brown counter by a salesgirl half her age. She went downstairs and greeted the children stiffly, motioning to Dolores to keep them away so she could maintain the illusion that she always dressed like this.
    She went out to the garage, got into the car, remembered her cell phone, clattered back into the house, returned to the car, remembered her umbrella, made it back to the house in time to answer the ringing phone in the kitchen. It was her mother in North Carolina.
    “Hi, Mom, look, I’ll have to call you later. I’m running out the door.”
    “You sound tense,” her mother said. “Where are you going?”
    “To a party for Claire’s book.”
    “In the city?”
    “Yes. And I’m late.”
    “I read her book,” her mother said. “Have you?”
    “Not yet.”
    “Well. You might want to.”
    “I will, one of these days,” Alison said, consciously ignoring her mother’s insinuating tone. Then the children were on her. Six-year-old Annie dissolved in tears, and Dolores had to peel Noah off Alison’s legs like starfish from a rock. Alison made it out to the car again, calling, “I’ll be home soon!” and madly blowing kisses, and realized when she turned on the engine that she didn’t have a bottle of water, which was annoying, because you never knew how long it would take to get into the city, but fuck it. There was no way she could go inside again. Halfway down the driveway she saw Annie and Noah in the front window, frantically waving at her and jumping up and down. Alison pressed the button to roll down her window and waved back. As she pulled the car into the street she could see Noah’s cheek mashed up against the glass, his hand outstretched, his small form resigned and motionless as he watched her drive away.
    EAST END AVENUE was quiet and damp in the shadows of early evening. Several blocks over, traffic swished and rumbled, but here Alison was the only one on the street. After easily finding a parking spot—just in time for the changing of the guard from metered to free, a rare lucky break—she locked the car doors and pulled her coat tightly around her. It wasn’t raining now, but the air was chilly; bare trees creaked in the sharp wind like old bedsprings. The avenue, the buildings, even the cars parked along the street, were washed in dull tones. Early March—not yet spring, though not still winter. A purgatorial season, Alison thought, when the manufactured cheer of the holidays has worn off, and desolation feels palpable. Or maybe just to her. She wasn’t sure, and had so little confidence anymore, in ascribing opinions to other adults. She seemed to have lost the ability to gauge what they might be feeling and thinking. (Children were a different story; she had developed an uncanny ability to decipher their moods—even those of the ones that weren’t hers.) She wondered if such an ability, which she used to pride herself on, was a social skill you could lose without practice.
    The doorman, dressed in a navy blue uniform and standing just inside the small vestibule leading to the lobby, inclined his head and said, “Good evening, miss,” as Alison