Back in April, Louisa broached the two weeks in Maine: mind you, these were two weeks they’d marked on the calendar in the fall. Steven had gone into a full-blown panic. He couldn’t leave All Ears! Not even for a long weekend. Not even for a minute, not really. The way he talked about the company it was a house made of Popsicle sticks balanced one on top of the other with Steven’s hand the base holding the entire thing up.
“But you’ve been working like this all year!” she’d said. They were unloading the dishwasher.
“You’ve been on sabbatical. It was the right time to focus on the company. We talked about this.” Steven filed the silverware neatly into the drawer.
“Sabbaticals are supposed to be for working, not for cleaning toilets and hanging out the washing.” A misrepresentation, obvious to both of them: nobody cleaned the toilets in their home all that often, and they had a clothes dryer. “And I’m behind on my book, because you’ve been working so much. We decided on these two weeks inSeptember,remember?”
“September was a long time ago. Things have shifted. I can’t leave for two weeks. I just can’t. I’m sorry, Louisa. I thought we’d be further along than we are now. It’s really hard to predict how long each step in the process is going to take. And while we’re trying to get funding—I can’t be gone. What if we send them to camp? Then you could work, and I could work.”
“Camp? Steven. It’sApril. People signed up for camps inOctober.We can’t find a camp now. And it would cost, like,thousandsfor three kids. And Matty would feel too old to go. And plus, I don’t want them to experience camp. I want them to experience Maine.”
“Right,” said Steven. “Okay. Sorry. Yeah, camp isn’t the answer. We don’t have thousands right now. Unless we use the Emergency Fund...”
“No,” said Louisa. “Definitely not. That’s not what EF is for.”
They gazed at each other over the steaming glasses. This, Louisa realized, was what could appear in a dictionary next to the wordimpasse:two married people, arms folded, waiting to see who might blink first.
Finally Louisa blinked, and the situation had been resolved thusly: Louisa would take the children to Owls Head for the whole summer, removing them all, Louisa included, from Steven’s hair so he could work his sixteen- or nineteen- or twenty-seven-hour days without guilt or compunction. Louisa would use the relatively relaxing atmosphere of Ships View, where her children could roam more freely, to get the bulk of her book complete, so that by the time school and routines started again the whole McLean family could return to some semblance of normalcy.
She traces the arm of the love seat with her fingers. Can she say any of this to her mother? Her parents’ marriage is as steady as the tides, solid as a rock. Annie might try to understand, or she might not try, but either way she wouldn’t really, truly get it. When Louisa was growing up, Annie was always home. “I won’t bore you with the details,” she says. She yawns. “I need to get on a good schedule while I’m here. I have so much to do on the book!”
“How much?”
“Most of it,” she confesses.
Annie tsk-tsks. “Oh, Louisa. You poor thing. Where’d your sabbatical go?”
This is anexcellentquestion. Wheredidher sabbatical go? In the fall she was just getting used to her new life and routines, and there were so many things around the house she and Steven simply couldn’t get to with both of them working so much. Once everyone was off to school and work, therefore, Louisa allowed herself the luxury of tackling one small home project per day, culled from a list she kept tacked to the bulletin board. But! As anyone who has ever undertaken a home organization project in a perennially disorganized home knows, there is no such thing as a project thatexists in a vacuum—setting the pun aside. One project begets another, begets another, and onward into eternity. So when Louisa foundone of Claire’s socksin the junk drawer in the kitchen, naturally this led her to Claire’s room, which was a morass in the best of times and a certifiable federal disaster site in the worst. And let’s just say this was not the best of times. Louisa spent forty-seven minutes organizing the sock drawer, another eighteen looking online for replacement pairs for all of the socks that had undergone a conscious uncoupling. By then her coffee had grown cold, and why not just make a fresh pot? Wasn’t this the point of working from home, to allow a moment here or there for domestic conveniences? Anyway, think of what she was saving by not purchasing her usual morning coffee outside the house. And the disposable cup she was not using besides!
Which reminded her, she needed to order a fresh bag of coffee beans after she had found the right socks for Claire. She might just do that very quickly before she went back to work.
Days went by like this, then weeks. Every day began fresh, full of endless possibilities, and ended on a sour note, all hope annulled.
In November, Abigail came down with the flu. Just as she got better, Claire contracted strep. Then Matty’s school began a week of half days for parent-teacher conferences. After that, the holidays were upon them. There were cards to address, and gifts to shop for and hide. Lights to string. In past years Steven and Louisa might have shared some of these tasks, but with Steven working so many hours at All Ears and Louisa at home, it seemed silly not to take on the greater burden herself. She baked cookies; she attempted, and failed at, homemade marshmallows to go in the Christmas morning cocoa. Two of her stay-at-home mom friends, who thoughtsabbaticalandvacationwere synonymous, took to stopping by unannounced.
January came. A productive month! Sort of. Well, she got started, anyway. Except she had to travel to San Francisco to give a talkat a conference, and the jet lag set her back three days after she returned. January became February. February slid into March. In March she had to do two peer reviews of papers and read a graduate student’s dissertation. March bled into April. Once she decided to spend the summer in Maine, there was no point in settling down for long stretches at home. She knew she’d get so much more done in Owls Head. The breeze flowing off Penobscot Bay would clear her cluttered mind, allow her to work untrammeled. Come September, she’d turn in her book. It was simple, really. It was just time arithmetic. Sixty-four pages down, out of an expected three hundred. Two hundred and thirty-six pages to go, over—how many days? Ten weeks. Seventy days. Two hundred thirty-six divided by seventy. Well, she couldn’t do math in her head, which was why she taught history and not calculus. But it seemed doable. Right? In Owls Head she’d get up early; she’d stay up late. She’d cut down on her alcohol consumption so her mind would be sharp for evening work. She’d work after the kids were tucked in.
She takes a sip of her whiskey. It goes down smooth and easy, the way she imagines a front-porch lemonade in summertime Kentucky might go down.
She will start her new schedule tomorrow. The day after, at the very latest.
6.
Kristie
Kristieisa fast learner—she wasn’t lying to Fernando—and after two training shifts she’s on the floor. The bill collectors have begun employing some new tactics: they call at different times every day, they call from different area codes. They have a lot of tricks, but what they don’t have yet is Kristie’s new address on Linden Street. She figures it’s only a matter of time before they find it, but for now, yes, she will just turn off her phone.
At the end of her first shift she’s released early, leaving more tips to the more established servers. She gets it; that’s how the restaurant world works. She rolls silverware with a girl named Natalie. Natalie has long blond hair with enviable natural curl. She’s going into her junior year at Northwestern. Her parents have owned a summer home in Owls Head forever, and this is the third summer she’s worked at Archer’s—first as a bus girl and now as a server.
“It’s pretty good,” she tells Kristie. “Fernando can be an asshole sometimes but the tips are good, especially if you’re out on the deck.”
“Everybody can be an asshole sometimes,” says Kristie. “There’s nothing Fernando can throw at me that I haven’t already seen.”
Natalie looks at Kristie, dazzled. “Yeah,” she says loyally. Natalie’s life could not be more opposite from Kristie’s. While they roll she tells Kristie a story about her boyfriend, who is doing a service project in Peru that he hopes will get him into medical school. The story is long and involved and has something to do with a shaman and a two-day hike. Eventually Kristie loses the thread of the tale because all she can think is,who are these people? And where did they get these lives?
“How about you?” asks Natalie. “What’s your story?”
Kristie thinks about volunteering the time Jesse smoked a bad batch of K2 and ended up in the ER. “No story,” she says. “I was living in Pennsylvania until recently, and I wanted to try someplace new. So here I am.”
