Prologue
Zoe
Like most of my dumb ideas, this one came from the internet.
Okay, the internet and insomnia.
Fine. The internet, insomnia, and wine.
I’d been lonely that night, stuck inside in deference to the miserable end-of-August heat and humidity, almost every day culminating in rolling thunder, heat lightning, flashes of pouring rain that did nothing to cool the air. My two best friends, Kit and Greer, were both unavailable for my proposed let’s-get-drunk-and-do-a-puzzle night—Kit was with her boyfriend Ben, newly reunited and too cute by half, and Greer had just left for a week-long Hawthorne family vacation. And I was still unwilling, over eight months since I’d quit in a blaze of jackpot-winning glory, to call up any of my friends from my former firm. Or maybe I was realizing, finally, that they hadn’t really beenfriends at all.
Lonely, a little drunk, and only a laptop for company? Truly, it was a recipe for disaster—or I guess for watching pornography—but instead I’d decided to try, once again, to get something going with my long-promised lottery-win project.An adventure,I’d told my friends on that night we’d bought the ticket, staking my claim for what I’d do with the cash. I’d imagined an around-the-world trip, something to take me away from everything familiar, something that would be different enough that I’d come out a whole new Zoe—more perspective, more peace, moresomething. But every time I’d tried to make a decision, every time I said to myself,Today, you plan your trip, I’dbeen paralyzed.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I’d said to Greer one night as we’d strolled through the travel section of the bookstore, a place—along with the gym, the park nearest my house, and my friend Betty’s restaurant—where I’d spent an embarrassing number of hours since leaving my job. “You’re in school. Kit’s bought the house. You’re doing it, doing what you said you’d do, and I’m—stuck.” Utterly and completelystuck.
“It’s a big change,” Greer had said. “Your whole life was your work. It takes time to recalibrate, right?”She’d paused, narrowed her eyes at the shelf in front of her. “‘Recalibrate’? I think I’ve been having dreams about Kit’s microscope. Let’s just buy a bunch of these books and see if weget any ideas.”
But the books hadn’t helped. Greer’s gentle encouragement hadn’t helped. Kit and Betty sticking labels to the dartboard at the bar with various place-names on it hadn’t helped, especially because I have superb aim. I was in a rut. I’d only ever felt like this once before in my life, and back then I’d dealt with it by doing something so insane and reckless that I knew I had to tread carefully this time, not fuck up my life—or someone else’s—again.
Maybe I’d been approaching it wrong, I told myself as I opened my laptop, smooshing myself into the corner of the couch, a lame, furniture-assisted cuddle that was the best I could get in my single state. Maybe I needed to stop thinking about a schedule, a set-in-stone path for this trip, and think about—inspiration. Pictures of places I wanted to see. Travelvibes, not travelplans.
So I’d navigated to some feel-good lifestyle site, the kind that shows you a bunch of food you should be cooking and crafts you should be doing to make your life fuller and happier and also more suitable for display on your Instagram. Never mind that my cooking is rudimentary and my last craft project was a noodle-jewelry box I made in third grade; never mind that I don’t even have an Instagram. Something about thepossibilityof such a lifestyle soothed me that night, and so there I was, clicking through a bunch of filter-heavy photos of artisanal kale and handwoven hammocks and fingerless-glove-clad hands wrapped around huge, latte-filled mugs, clever heart shapes foaming on top, forgetting, once again, all about my longed-for travel vibes.
Looking back, I wonder if I’d not only been drunk, but also perhaps stunned into some kind of nectarous, curated-lifestyle coma, because why in God’s name would I, Zoe No-Time-for-Bullshit Ferris, click on a picture of a “gratitude jar”? But there it was: a rustic-looking Ball jar, weathered pastel slips of paper with rough-hewn edges folded and tucked inside, and, so far as I could tell, several strands of completely unserviceable pieces of jute twine wound around the outside. Each day, the idea was, you record a good memory on a small slip of paper, fold it up, and put it in the jar. Then, when you’re feeling low, you extract one of those little shabby-chic scraps of joy from your jam jar and get on with feeling grateful about what life hashanded to you.
Well. I certainly had well over a million reasons to be grateful, didn’t I? So why didn’t I feel any joy? Why couldn’t I justget on?Maybe,drunk-lonely Zoe had thought,I need thejar.
Of course, I didn’t have a jar, or twine, or antique-looking paper. I had a Baccarat Tornado vase and a stack of Smythson stationery. And somewhere between me cutting my cardstock into squares (not rough-hewn; are you kidding, I wasn’t that drunk) and actually putting pen to paper, the real idea—thedumbidea—had hit me.
What I needis a guilt jar.
It seemed so clear. It was the guilt that was keeping me from doing the trip, or from doing anything, really, since I’d taken home my share of the winnings. It was the guilt that was always there, ever since I was nineteen years old, piling on year after year, but now that I wasn’t working seventy hours a week, now that I wasn’t scheduling my free time down to the second, now that I’d been the beneficiary of the kind of luck I knew I didn’t deserve, I actually had time to really wallow in it. Sure, the wine wasn’t helping, but that night, I was brutally honest with myself:You’ve done wrong. And you need to fixit to move on.
After that, it’d been easy. On those little scraps of cardstock, I’d recorded my failures, starting with the comparatively minute.The time I made Dan cry at work. When I snapped at the Starbucks barista for not knowing my regular order. When I parked in one of thoseFor New Moms Onlyspots at the grocerybecause I had menstrual cramps and it felt close enough. Forgetting my assistant’s birthday (2x). Avoiding eye contact with the homeless man who always sits outside Betty’s, even when I give him money.On and on, until it’d gotten trickier, until I’d had to get to the truly painful, did-you-even-drink-that-wine sobering ones. The ones I confined to names: first, names from the cases I was having such trouble forgetting. Then, names I wouldn’t ever forget:
Dad.
Mom.
Christopher.
At first I wasn’t exactly sure how the guilt jar would work. The gratitude jar was for contemplation’s sake, but the problem with my guilt was that I contemplated it pretty much every fucking night of my life, and so if I was going to get any joy out of this thing, I was going to have to do something other than simplylookat my recordings. I was going to have to fix what I’d broken, or at least I was goingto have to try.
Thanks to the lottery, I had means.
Thanks to my unemployment, I had time.
And that jar, it was going to give me thewill.
Chapter 1
Zoe
I choose a Wednesday morning to draw my first guilt slip.
That’s far enough away from the night I came up with the idea to give me perspective, but not so far that I seem like I’m avoiding it. I try not to be weird about it, but the slip-drawing does take on this ritualistic quality, even though I’m wearing monkey pajamas and an antiaging face mask. The worst thing about leaving my job since the lottery win has been what’s happened to my days—or, I guess, what’snothappened to them. Before, when I was working, my days were so regimented that they were almost comical; once I asked my assistant to set a timer every time I went to pee to see how many minutes my bladder was costing me (too many minutes, so I cut back on coffee). Now I spend a lot of time drifting around, wondering what to make of my time, wondering whether I’ll ever go back to some kind of work, wondering how I managed to become the kind of person who isn’t working at all, who hasn’t worked in well over half a year.
But the guilt jar, much as it contains my most painful flaws, is giving me a sense of purpose I haven’t felt in a while, and so I put it in the center of my dining room table and take a seat, setting my mug of tea in front of me. There’s a familiarity to this setup, sort of like the Sunday mornings I’d get up early and work on briefs before meeting Kit and Greer, and I try to let that familiarity blanket the contrasting feeling of unease. The steam rising out of my mug isn’t helping, though—the vase is starting to take on magic cauldron-like qualities. Maybe one of those slips is going to fly out and hitme in the face.
