Chapter One
Present
I pull into my driveway, turn off the ignition, and lean over the steering wheel to gaze at the sun playing peekaboo through the leaves of the London Plane Sycamore trees. The gardeners came today, as they do every other Tuesday, and now my white Colonial Revival with black shutters and climbing ivy looks straight out of a Nora Ephron movie. Despite my dashboard display measuring the weather at a perfect springtime seventy-two degrees here in Sacramento, I slouch glumly and contemplate, once again, the question that’s dogged me for twenty-two years: When the hell am I getting out of here?
Ding.
6:12 p.m. (Lisa)
Couldn’t decide, white or rosé, so I got both. See you in 30.
I consider texting Lisa back to save her wine—I already bought a bottle—but stop myself. After a week in New York, my rabid health nut of a husband returns home tomorrow to his chia seeds and me, so I’m cracking open an extra bottle or two this evening to cheers my last night of tortilla chips and Netflix. I’ll send the empty evidence home with Lisa and sleep off my hangover until I have to be at the airport at 1:00 p.m. to pick him up. Since Thomas started traveling more for work, Lisa andI have perfected the girls-night-out-without-leaving-the-house evening. This is our last night together. Well, the last until Thomas leaves again.
6:13 p.m. (Callie)
I just pulled in with crappy snacks. And by crappy, I mean worthy of a team of PMS teen queens. Honk twice when you get home.
It’s so convenient when your drinking buddy lives across the street.
Stepping out of my custom-blue hybrid Range Rover, I notice chocolate smudged on the inner-thigh seam of my cream sweatpants—sorry, “joggers.” They cost me $120 even though they have never been jogging. Looking down, I also see a matching fudgy trail melted on my car seat. I lick my fingertips to clean off residue from the bag of half-price chocolate mini Easter eggs I polished off between the grocery store and my house, flick to the floor the remaining brown shards, and wipe vigorously at the caramel leather seat with my wet thumb. I sit back down and wiggle my ass to dry off the spit, because these pants are obviously going right into the wash. This is yet another reason why Thomas nags me to keep wet wipes in my car console.
Determined to make only one trip inside, I thread each arm with two stuffed nylon bags and click my fob to lock the car. I miss the days when John and Andrew lived at home and would help me unload the trunk. Though it’s been two years, it seems like just yesterday that Andrew joined John at UC Berkeley. I used to call for my sons, and they would tumble over each other out the front door, hoping this was the trip to the supermarket when I bought real Pop-Tarts, not the frosting-free, organic pomegranate substitutes that Thomas barely tolerated. The raucous energy and deafening soundtrack of my boys and their friends was the only thing I ever truly liked about my house. With the boys at college and Thomas on perpetual work/travel, I have come to hate the long stretches of silence.
Walking across my lawn, I take a big swing with the grocery bags at the Realtor’s sign and immediately aggravate my lingering frozenshoulder. The sight of the placard staked in my front yard never fails to piss me off. Six months ago, with Thomas’s mere mention of being considered for the next CEO of LonGev, I wanted to be ready to move back to New York at a moment’s notice, so I called Cathy Culpepper of Central Valley Real Estate fame and told her to snap the chain on my forty-eight-hundred-square-foot California shackle immediately. Now splitting his time between hunkering down in Sacramento with me and sucking up to the C-suites in New York, Thomas remains in negotiation limbo, waiting for a solid offer. Same with our house. The empty box of house-spec sheets and the “For Sale” sign mock my frustration by swaying forcefully from the hooks only to settle back to stillness, reminding me it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. And neither am I.
With a twist of my wrist, I catch a glimpse of my watch. Excellent. I have enough time for a quick cigarette before Lisa shows up. I allow myself one cigarette a day, and there are rules: Thomas has to be on the other side of the Mississippi River; I only smoke alone with ’90s rap blaring through my AirPods; and I sequester myself in the northeast corner of my property. I flick the ashes over the fence into my neighbor’s backyard to avoid any smell drifting toward the house I’m desperate to sell and that my my-body-is-my-temple husband eventually comes home to.
After putting the snacks away, I head to the mudroom to kick off my big-buckle Birkenstocks and slip out of my stained pants without bending over and risking aggravating the nearly healed sciatica in my left hip. My pack of cigarettes resides in the dog-treats jar for the dog we never got. My argument against having a pet was that it’s cruel to have one in New York. Thomas, John, and Andrew countered that we actually lived on half an acre in California, and we were losing out on adorable dogs going to families who did not suffer from geographic commitment. I reminded them that hopefully the half acre would not be ours for much longer. Ultimately, we compromised with a cute paw-printed ceramic container and occasionally fostering a litter of puppies over three-day holiday weekends to give the dedicated workers at the Humane Society a much-needed break.
“What are you doing?!” Lisa yelps as she steps through my sliding glass door onto the back patio, two bottles of white tucked under her armpit. In bold black letters across her chest, it saysKnock Knock Knockers on Heaven’s Door. TheO’s have dots inside them, like areolas. Most of Lisa’s T-shirts are adorned with borderline offensive one-liners. She calls it her “thing.” I call it an out-of-office middle finger to her job as vice president of human potential at a technology company, where she babysits over a hundred infantile Gen Z tech bros. Far more often than a grown woman should have to, Lisa is forced to remind these man-children to wash, change their hoodies, not eat on Zoom calls, and show up for meetings on time. Lisa loves to rant about her stunted protégés, but I think she secretly revels in molding them into datable potential for their generational counterparts.
“What?” I yell above Slim Shady angrily declaring his name, and take out one of my earbuds.
“What are you doing out here smoking?”
I look at Lisa, confused. Other than Quinn, my best friend from college, Lisa’s the only person who knows I still have a rare smoke, though she’s only seen me do it on one occasion. Thomas believes I quit in an act of solidarity when he committed himself to a life of supplements and sobriety after he joined nascent LonGev over two decades ago. I’ve never let him think otherwise. Everyone is allowed a secret or three.
“Without any pants on!” Lisa accusingly jabs her index finger toward me. I look down at my bare feet, then up my pasty-white, shapeless legs to the elastic of my underwear peeking out below the trim of my light-knit cashmere sweater. In the warmth of the day, I guess I hadn’t noticed. Or cared.
“Whatever.” Lisa shrugs and puts the bottles down on my patio table. “Give me one.” She assesses my face. “You don’t look so good.” Her eyes narrow as if she’s trying to make intimate contact with each of my pores. “A little sweaty. And puffy too, like you haven’t been sleeping. Did you try the CBD drops I gave you?”
“You know I’ve tried everything you’ve tried.” Our shared inability to fall asleep, and stay asleep, is a conversation that plays on a loop between Lisa and me. We have no confirmed conclusions on how to attain the elusive REM state in our fifties.
Lisa swats her cigarette at a fly that’s unbothered by the fact that the twisted blond bun atop her head is not a landing pad. I take a step back to avoid any airborne ashes singeing my bare legs. “When was the last time you saw your doctor?”
“I don’t know. It’s been a while. But I don’t think pants-less is any fifty-two-year-old’s best look,” I reply in defense of myself, hoping my answer will shut down her assessment of my state of disrobement. Who would expect a woman to put in extra effort when her husband is away? Isn’t that one of the perks of having a bicoastal partner? Sometimes I’m even a little jealous that Lisa doesn’t have to consider how she looks in her own home. She swore off men after divorcing her second husband when he helped himself to her life savings to support his career change. He went from a middle-school principal to a Las Vegas high-stakes poker player with zero evidence he was any good at the game.
I feel my internal fireplace ignite from a starter-fluid combination of indignation and waning hormones. Sweat dapples my chest and warms my inner thighs, suctioning them together, and I execute a shallow plié to circulate some air down there.
“No, that’s not it,” Lisa insists, continuing to study me with an appraising look. “Something’s off.” Before I’ve sucked it down to the filter, Lisa plucks the dwindling cigarette out of my mouth, like that’s going to fix my undiagnosed symptoms. She crushes both our butts under her foot and smiles expectantly, looking for credit that she’s possibly saved my life right here, right now. I would prefer that her unsolicited savior syndrome start tomorrow. Or never.
“Come on, Callie. Let’s go drink in the comfort of your air-conditioning. I’m dying of thirst out here.” Welcoming the change in subject, I pick up the crushed butts, peel the right side of my underwear out of my crack, and follow Lisa into the kitchen.
Chapter Two
Present
“Thomas!” Lisa yelps, double-fisting the uncorked bottles and hiding a half-naked me behind her. I stuff the cigarette butts in the waistband of my underwear. “Aren’t you supposed to be home tomorrow?”
