Love All: A Novel Read Free Page B

him. He’d had plenty of time to plumb his psyche for an answer—during every school tour, at least one parent asked him why he’d wanted to “open a day-care center.” The best he’d come up with so far: “I thought I’d get in my two cents early.”
    A more honest answer might’ve been that it had taken Hugh a long time to grow up, and he could still access those childhood feelings of being utterly lost in the social jungle of a school playground. There were clear rules in Hugh’s preschool. No hitting, no spitting, no throwing the sand. Be nice to your friends, use your words, and always wear your listening ears. Seedlings’ rule book was a blueprint for blossoming—kids needed all the help they could get, and Hugh remembered how hard it could be to choose a direction and go.
    Hugh’s capacity for decision-making seemed to have shorted out around the age of ten, when his brother, George, had slipped through the ice in the creek behind their rented ski cabin, and Hugh’s parents had more or less followed their firstborn down. Reeling from the loss, they’d sent Hugh to boarding school, then summer camp, then college, until eventually he’d found comfort in the predictability of it all. Hugh was used to school: syllabi, reading lists, and course catalogs; orientation, registration, reading periods, and final exams. He was accustomed to the schedule of Labor Day to Memorial Day followed by summer internships and peppered with brief Sunday-night phone calls home. Hugh had even stayed on after his college graduation to work in the admissions office, conducting information sessions for potential applicants, until the dean politely informed him that he was no longer a recent graduate and it was time to move on. So to complete the circle Hugh had gone to graduate school for a master’s in education, but even he could see that something was missing, that he was missing something—adventure, chance, hunger, thirst. He was on a conveyor belt of September to September and he was too afraid to get off.
    *   *   *
    When Hugh met his wife, at a party in Cambridge during his final year of graduate school, he’d been impressed first by her self-confidence, then by her beauty. Newly single—having recently broken up with a cellist who waited tables—Hugh had accepted an invitation from an old boarding-school friend to a wine tasting at his apartment, and the night of the party Hugh showered and shaved and put on his best outfit, then headed across the Charles with a bottle of Cold Duck. He hadn’t been thinking: when Hugh saw that he was the sole hippie element in a sea of blue-blazered men, he quickly returned to the entryway to ditch his belted cardigan.
    “You’re not leaving,” he heard behind him—less a question than a command—and he turned, flustered, and found himself looking into the bluest eyes he’d ever seen.
    “No, I’m just—this sweater.” Hugh tried to shrug it off his shoulders, but the belt had knotted.
    The woman extended her hand, introducing herself as Anne Cole, and Hugh reached to take it. She wore a striped oxford shirt tucked into a tweed skirt, and brown boots with platforms so high she rose to meet Hugh’s eyes. Silently, Hugh admired her manicured nails against his olive skin.
    “I like your sweater,” said Anne. “You should wear it. Unless you’re hot. Then you should take it off.”
    Hugh smiled. After weeks of hemming and hawing with the cellist, he appreciated Anne’s straightforwardness. “I’ll wear it,” he said.
    Hugh offered to get her a drink, and at the self-tended bar he filled two glasses with red wine, then joined Anne in the corner she had carved out for them.
    “Are you at HBS?” she asked, accepting her glass. “I haven’t seen you at the law school.”
    “BU,” said Hugh.
    “Law?”
    “No,” said Hugh. “Education.”
    Anne smiled and said, “I always loved school.”
    Anne was a second-year law student at Harvard (where Hugh had failed