36

claire

The kids are upstairs taking showers and putting on their pajamas when Chris gets home a little after eight on a Friday night in mid-November.

“Hi,” he says. He shrugs out of his suit coat and drapes it over the back of a kitchen chair.

“Hi. How was your week?” I’m amazed at how formal our communication has become. I miss how easy it used to be to talk to Chris. Now our weekly debriefing sessions—filled with snippets of our workweek and what the kids are up to—are polite, sterile exchanges that are only slightly more passionate and significant than discussing the weather. Gone are the days when we sat down and ate dinner as a family, listening as the kids shared the highlights of their day. And then after, when the kids were asleep, back when Chris worked for only an hour or so in the evening, we’d go to bed and share different things with each other.

“Busy,” he says. “We’re still understaffed, in the field and at headquarters.” Another by-product of the recession: companies trying to make do with as few resources on the payroll as they can get by with, which means it’s the employees who must pick up the slack. “But I closed every sale I was working on.” Chris smiles, and vibrates with an energy I haven’t seen in a while. He looks good. Tired, but good. No longer underweight, he’s filling out his shirt nicely thanks to the workouts he told me he was squeezing in at the hotel fitness centers. “It makes me feel better,” he said. “Relieves a little of my stress.”

He reaches into the refrigerator and grabs a beer.

“Congratulations,” I say, and I mean it. I finish loading the dishwasher and then fill the coffeepot with water and fresh grounds, setting the timer so it will brew automatically the next morning.

He opens the beer and takes a long drink. “Thanks.”

I yell upstairs to the kids. “Hey, guys, Dad’s home.” Jordan comes tearing down the stairs, hair wet, wearing her Hello Kitty nightgown, and launches herself into his arms. We’ll have trouble getting her to bed tonight. Her requests for one more book and for Chris to stay with her until she falls asleep will continue until I finally go in and play the heavy, which will leave me feeling drained and sad. She misses him. Why wouldn’t she? Jordan fires off a stream-of-consciousness-style recap of her entire week, barely stopping to take a breath, and Chris listens attentively. They relocate to the couch and Jordan snuggles up close. I smile when he kisses the top of her head.

Josh hasn’t come downstairs, so I go up to see what’s taking him so long. He’s sitting on his bed, halfheartedly strumming his guitar. “Hey, buddy. Dad’s home. Aren’t you coming downstairs?”

“Yeah,” he says, without enthusiasm.

I sit down next to him on the bed. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothin’,” he says. I wait patiently, to see if I can coax a bit more out of him by not pushing. He strums a few more times and then puts down the guitar. “It’s just that Jordan won’t shut up long enough to let me talk to Dad. And he’s just gonna leave again anyway.”

“He’ll be home all weekend,” I point out.

“Yeah, working.”

This isn’t really fair, because Chris tries hard to make sure he spends plenty of time with the kids, and Josh knows it. My belief is that his attitude stems more from his overall frustration at having one of his parents unavailable five nights out of seven than any real sense of injustice. I feel his pain.

“Come on down,” I say. “Dad wants to see you. He misses you guys a lot.”

“Okay,” he says, finally acquiescing. “But tell Jordan I get a turn.”

I ruffle his hair. “I will. I promise.” He follows me down the stairs. When Chris looks up and opens his arms, Josh goes to him, and watching them embrace puts a smile on my face. I will never say that Chris doesn’t love his children with his whole heart. He does.

After we put the kids to bed Chris goes into the office and shuts the door. I read a book on the couch with Tucker curled up next to me. An hour later I finish my book, but I don’t really feel like starting a new one. I peruse the movies in our extensive DVD collection instead. I’m not in the mood for anything violent, but Chris isn’t really a fan of chick flicks, so I compromise with Up in the Air. I’ve already watched it, more than once in fact, but George Clooney stars in it and I never get tired of him. I poke my head into the office.

“Do you want to watch a movie?” I ask, hoping he’ll be willing to take a break.

“Sure. Go ahead and pick one.”

“I already did,” I say, holding up the case.

He doesn’t respond.

“Chris?”

He finally stops typing and looks up. “Sure. Go ahead and start it. I’ll be out in a minute.”

I pop the disk into the DVD player and sit down on the couch. We used to watch movies all the time, snuggled under the same blanket. Sometimes I’d fall asleep, my head in Chris’s lap.

I sit through several previews but they end and the movie starts. I’m still waiting for Chris to join me forty-five minutes later. I click off the DVD player and the TV.

“I’m tired,” I say when I poke my head into the office. “I’m going to bed.”

“You are?” Chris asks, without looking up from his computer. It’s as if he’s fallen into an alternate reality, and I’m surprised he even heard me. “I thought we were going to watch a movie?”

“Yeah, me, too. Maybe some other night.”

In our bedroom, I strip off my clothes and put on my pajamas. After I brush my teeth and wash my face I slide underneath the covers. There’s nothing on TV when I click through the channels, and I don’t feel like walking back downstairs to find another book. Strangely, I’m both tired and restless. And bored. I shut off the lamp and lie there in the dark. It’s almost ten thirty, but I grab my phone from the nightstand and call Daniel. I haven’t heard from him since I received his last text a few hours earlier.

He answers on the third ring. “Claire?”

I can hardly hear him over the noise in the background. “Where are you?” I ask.

“Out with the guys. We’re watching the game.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Before I can hang up he says, “No. Just give me a second.” A minute later the noise disappears, save for the occasional sound of a car honking its horn.

“Are you outside?”

“Yes. Couldn’t hear you in there.”

“It’s cold out.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“I don’t want to interrupt your evening. Go back to your friends.”

“It’s no big deal. What are you doing?”

“I’m lying in bed.” I didn’t think before I spoke and now that the words are out of my mouth, I realize they sounded more suggestive than I intended them to.

“Oh?” he says. “Tell me more.”

Suddenly, I’m not so bored.

This is very different in context and tone from anything Daniel has ever said to me in person. I don’t think he’s drunk, but there’s a slightly flirtatious lilt to his words that tells me he’s had a few.

“I’m just tired. But now I can’t sleep.” It’s very difficult not to imagine Daniel here in this bed with me. Holding me close. Touching my skin. His lips on mine. I tell myself that it’s okay to imagine. These are my thoughts and they won’t hurt anything. It’s no different than thinking about George Clooney.

Except that I’m not on the phone with George Clooney.

“Is he home?” He rarely mentions Chris by name.

“Yes. He’s downstairs, working.”

“And you’re lying there? In the dark?”

My body temperature rises when he says those words. I’m fairly certain that Daniel is now imagining scenarios of his own, which means that we have just skated into very unfamiliar territory. “Yes.”