Good Intentions Read Free Page A

he lifted the small, silver-framed photograph of Lynn’s once happy family into his large hands.
    “Yes, it was. Three, to be exact. Have I aged so noticeably?” Why had she asked that?
    “Not you,” he said, returning the picture to its place on the windowsill. “Gary.” He pronounced the word carefully, giving it an exaggerated fullness that made it sound vaguely obscene.
    “Oh yes,” she said, picking at the already chipped white polish of her nails. “I’d forgotten that you’ve met.”
    “Met? Why, I introduced them. ‘Gary Schuster, I’d like you to meet my wife, Suzette. Suzette, I’d like you to meet Gary Schuster. He’s the lawyer who’ll be finalizing the deal on our new house.’” He laughed. “A writer’s supposed to appreciate irony.” He took a long sip of his beer, then looked back out the window. “It’s nice to live so close to the ocean,” he added incongruously.
    “I love to walk along the beach,” she confided, finding this a safer topic, momentarily relaxing her guard. “It helps me keep things in perspective.”
    “Just how
do
you keep this in perspective?”
    “I’m not sure what you mean.”
    “Well, your husband comes home from the office one day and tells you that he’s leaving you for another woman. How do you deal with that?”
    “Privately,” she said, her defenses back on full alert.
    He smiled, the creases around his blue eyes deepening. “Sorry. A writer’s natural curiosity.”
    “Sounded more like the curiosity of a spurned husband,” Lynn said, then immediately wished she hadn’t. What was the point in being cruel? The man had obviously been hurt enough. His question wasn’t unnatural or even unexpected. But how could she tell him that even now, almost six full months after her husband had announced that he was leaving her for another woman, had, in fact, packed his bags and his law books—she had known he was serious when he packed his law books—and moved out, the whole thing had a distinct air of unreality? When he told her, straight out, “I’ve fallen in love with someone else; I’m leaving you,” she had experienced the peculiarly insular sensation that none of it was really happening, that she had fallen asleep while reading, comfortably curled up on the living-room sofa, and that this was merely an unpleasant dream. It was only when she spoke, and she had spoken only because he was obviously expecting her to, that she realized she was functioning in all three dimensions, and that her husband of fourteen years, father of her two young children, was actually planning to leave her.
    “You’re not serious,” she had said at the time, although it was perfectly obvious that he was. He had that hangdog look he always got when he thought he was sayingsomething important, and his normally sweet mouth was twitching expectantly, as if he had been formulating his rebuttal even before she spoke.
    “I am,” he told her slowly, “very serious. You know that we haven’t been really happy together in some time …”
    “What are you talking about?” she broke in, aware that he hated to be interrupted. “I didn’t know that we haven’t been happy. I’ve been happy. What are you talking about?”
    It was at this point, as he began his painstaking explanation, that she had begun feeling that this was not happening to her, but to someone else. It was as though she were behind her desk at the Delray Department of Social Services, listening to someone else relate this story secondhand. She saw herself sitting where she always sat when sad stories were being related, on the side of the desk that was free of such woes, the professional side, the
safe
side, where she could be moved, sometimes to tears (especially in the early years), but never actually
touched
, and certainly never bruised. She regularly gave ear to stories of severed households, of marriages that had been ripped apart in a flurry of fists, of neglected and beaten children, of