Wish Club Read Free Page B

into her eyes. The back of her throat ached with them. She remembered when sex used to be like this—impulsive and fun. Not goal-oriented. She loved Dan so much and she wanted to have his children. Their children. She wanted to watch him be a father and she knew he’d be great at it, the way kids always seemed to seek him out, to watch him make his funny faces and let him pull quarters out from behind their ears.
    More than anything, Claudia wanted Dan to want to be a father himself.
    He slid back down onto the bed and faced her. “Don’t worry so much.” He said it with a lightness in his voice that, had she wanted to look for trouble, could have been mistaken for indifference. She pressed her forehead against his chest to hide her tear-filled eyes and he hugged her close again, patting her back, rhythmically, absently, the way one might burp a baby.
     
    Snow
fell in clumps from the sky. The flakes joined together in the air as if through togetherness their fall to the earth would be easier to bear. The grass was already coated with them, and the sidewalks and streets were starting to lose their battle, changing over from wet to lightly frosted with snow. Gail could not believe her luck.
    For the past six weeks, ever since the October Book Club meeting and their first witchy spell, there hadn’t been a single drop of moisture from the sky, but today—with just ten shopping days left until Christmas—it looked like a damned blizzard outside her window.
    The rosebush next to the garage still had leaves on it, and it was now blanketed with snow, which seemed odd, somehow. Wrong. She looked over into the neighbor’s yard, where all the rosebushes had been lovingly mulched and covered with Styrofoam protectors months earlier.
    Gail’s eyes returned to her poor, miserable rosebush.
Oh well, too late now.
It had survived plenty of other winters without her interference, and it looked like it was going to have to survive at least one more.
    Emily was banging something in the other room. Gail wished the babysitter, Ellen, would get her to stop. Gail had been counting the minutes until Ellen’s arrival and now that she was finally here, all Gail wanted to do was go back into the other room and continue taking care of Emily. But she needed to do her shopping and she couldn’t be Santa with Emily around.
What is Emily hitting?
    Gail wondered if maybe she were sometimes being unfair to Emily, if all her patience for dealing with two-year-olds had been used up on Will and Andrew. The previous week, when Gail had run into the living room and caught Emily banging a potato against the window, she’d screamed, “No banging potatoes on the window!”
    Gail was not a yeller, but she’d been so ferociously mad. Now she had a hard time deciding what was more ridiculous: what she’d yelled, or how angry she’d been when she’d yelled it.
    For the better part of her life, Gail hadn’t been able to imagine herself yelling at all—except for maybe lines on a stage. But the safer choice had been business school and a degree in advertising, not drama and a degree in the fine arts. Besides, advertising appealed to her creative and avant-garde side. And she did it her way, as unconventionally as she could, choosing to study abroad for a year in Argentina, which was, ironically, where she met John, the beginning of the end of her unconventional ways.
    She loved her life now, she really did. But still, there were days when she wished she were back in her brief advertising career, when she still had the chrome desk at Foote, Cone, an admin at her disposal, great suits she could wear. At the very least, she’d settle for being addressed with a little respect—and maybe, just once in a while, a few hours to herself.
    The snow was coming down even harder now. Gail couldn’t get over it. The boys had been playing in their sandbox up until yesterday, and now it was nearly buried under a carpet of white. The highway was going to be a mess