Golden State Read Free

couch, and shut his eyes.
    “That bad?”
    “That bad,” he said. “I’m sorry about dinner.”
    “I hate your job.” I meant it. The incessant hours, the every-man-for-himself mentality in the guise of congenial partnership.
    “When the kids are through college . . .” His voice trailed off.
    We’d crossed this territory before. Eric’s conviction that he overworked for us, and mine that we never asked this of him. I never cared about money. My parents were lofty thinkers who drove old cars and took us on vacations to a dusty cabin in the Sierras. My first job out of college was as a temp for two dollars an hour. It got me to an attic room in Paris, with yogurt and French bread for dinner. When I finally trained for a career, it was as a teacher. When I married Eric in my parents’ backyard, my sister and I barefoot with wildflowers in our hair, he was a part-time high school athletic coach. I’d never felt like we needed anything more.
    I brushed Eric’s face with my fingers, and felt the deep creases spreading from his eyes. We were the same age.
    I was quiet for a moment. “Remember when my dad was alive and my mother still had Thanksgiving, when we’d sing ‘Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother’s House’ with Julia? And then she’d ask if every pair of trees along I-80 was the woods?”
    He laughed, no memory about the kids too corny for us. I asked if he was hungry. He said he was famished, no time even for lunch. In the kitchen, he picked up the wine bottle I’d bought and looked at the label. “I’m sorry,” he said again. I’d left the bottle out so he would be, but I was finished with that game.
    “Open it,” I said. He ate his reheated meal as if he’d never tasted anything as good. It was nearly midnight, but we talked as if we didn’t have to get up at six in the morning. Together, we’d always had that, the ability to forget about tomorrow.
    I told him what I’d heard on the news.
    “Jesus,” he said.
    “Julia was there.”
    He took my hand. “She’s okay,” he said.
    We weren’t talking about a terrible crime anymore. We were talking about Julia, our high-strung daughter, who wailed day and night as an infant, who later couldn’t tolerate a broken crayon, a wrinkled paper, or the seam on the toe of her socks. Our firstborn read by three, played chess at six, and began writing a novel at seven. Even now, we had to limit the hours she studied, enforce days off. Another mother might have bragged. I worried, and Eric reassured.
    We got in bed, listening to the water dripping in Lilly’s room. “You know what this means,” he said. “We can’t put off getting a new roof another year.”
    I nodded supportively but I didn’t agree. All the roof needed—all I needed—was for it to stop raining.
    Eric reached out his arm. I moved next to him, patted down the hair on his chest, and laid my head there. He was asleep immediately. I don’t know how he did that, awake to dead asleep in an instant, no drifting off.
    I didn’t want to go to sleep. I wanted to stay here, this hair pressing my cheek, the rhythm of this strong heart at my ear, the sound of rain on the window, punctuated by the night groans of an old house leaking at the seams.

chapter three
    T HANKSGIVING loomed and I still hadn’t made a single plan. The simplest and the hardest thing would be to start with Sara. Although my sister and I lived less than a hundred and fifty miles apart, we hadn’t seen each other in two years. Sara didn’t do holidays. She hated driving to the city from her place in Potter Valley. She hadn’t much liked my husband since he put on a suit sixteen years ago to go work as a lawyer. She’d say no, but I’d feel good about inviting her, as if the gulf between us were not wide, as if one day she might join us, and Bobby, too.
    I called from the wall phone in the kitchen while the kids and Eric watched TV in the family room. My sister and I had both been playing