The Half Life Read Free

taken on a familiar nagging edge.
    Words burst out of her mouth like clear water flooding past a dam. “He’s got a seminar!”
    Deborah drew in a breath—a suspicious-sounding breath—but before she could say another word or ask another question, Piper said, “It’s in New York. At the New School. He’s probably going to stay with Jeff and Rebecca, you know, in Brooklyn, instead of going back and forth every day with his pieces . . . you’ve got his cell, right?” she babbled. “You can always call him. I’m sure he’ll be back by Friday night, maybe Saturday morning . . .”
    She could picture her mother, her short cap of straw-colored hair, loose no-color cotton tops and elastic-waist pants, barefoot even though Piper had warned her that sometimes there were tiny shards and scraps of metal on the floor. Deborah had been resolutely single for thirty years, ever since she discovered Piper’s father had been seeing his secretary. She’d piled his belongings into suitcases, set the suitcases at the curb, and informed him that he was welcome to rejoin the family once he’d given up his extracurricular activities. Instead of giving up the secretary, her father had married her, and the two of them had settled in Oregon, and had twins . . . and how might things have worked out if, instead of giving him the boot, Deborah had tried to convince him to stay? Piper had never asked, but she knew for certain that her mother would have had little patience for Piper’s situation.
    â€œCall Carleen,” Piper said. “I meant to do it before I left. See if she can come help out.”
    Her mother’s tone grew marginally warmer. “Where’s her number?”
    â€œOn the fridge.” Piper waited, the telephone clamped in one icy hand, until Deborah reported that she’d found the number and would call Carleen and then call Piper back. Piper hung up, turned her phone off, and tucked it into her bag beside the letter. “I won’t be here when you come back.”The words clanged in her head. She closed her eyes.
    Piper Garroway met the man who would become her husband just the way the self-help books said she would. She met him when she wasn’t looking for a man or, really, for anything at all.
    She was twenty-two years old. She’d just graduated from college. On a whim, she’d taken over her friend Sarah’s share in a summer house at the Jersey shore after Sarah unexpectedly got into the Teach for America program and had to pack up and ship out to Louisiana posthaste. Sarah had paid twelve hundred dollars for the privilege of being one of eight people in a three-bedroom house, but she’d given Piper a break, accepting eight hundred bucks, plus the tent Piper had bought for Outdoor Orientation freshman year and hadn’t used since.
    The house was a disappointment, even at its bargain-basement price: A tumbledown ranch with vinyl siding, it had thin walls, sandy shag wall-to-wall carpeting, a shower that produced a grudging trickle of rust-colored water that rarely made it past lukewarm, and a single toilet that flooded at least once per visit. Worse, Piper arrived to find out that her eight hundred bucks didn’t even get her into one of the bedrooms. Eight hundred bucks, she learned, got her a spot on the pullout couch in the living room, next to a stranger, a strange man with the strange name of Tosh.
    â€œDon’t worry,” said one of her housemates, a girl named Lisa whom she vaguely remembered from her residence hall. “He’s hardly ever here.”
    â€œWhere does he go?” Piper asked.
    Lisa lifted her eyebrows and gave a knowing smirk. “He makes friends easily.”
    Piper met him on the beach that night. There was a bonfire, the obligatory keg of beer, and even though normally after a day in the sun and the water nothing would have made her happier than to shower, have a dinner of