“I think you took over that job years ago,” Mary Ellen snapped. “I’m just the breadwinner, remember?”
“Oh, come off it. You love your job. I made that possible for you.”
“Except I don’t, Matt. I don’t love it. I just happen to be good at it.” Mary Ellen felt something surge in her chest. “What you need to understand is that I love what I’m doing now—creating something interesting and new. You should try it.”
Matt was silent.
“Look,” Mary Ellen said. “I’ll call the girls in a couple of hours. After I run some errands. Okay? Tell them I’ll call and…and…we’ll talk about what happened. But I’m not coming home. I’m staying a little longer. I have more to do here.”
“What? But you said one week.”
“Justine said I could stay longer if it was going well, and it’s going well.”
“What are you going to tell Gallard?”
“Would you stop worrying about my job? I’ve got plenty of vacation time, okay? The paychecks will continue to flow. God.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“I know, I know. You just don’t like it when plans change. But that’s how life is, Matt. Things change. I’m sorry.”
Inside the Price Chopper, Mary Ellen browsed the aisles impatiently. It was the worst of the worst—nothing remotely organic, just shelf after shelf of colored, processed, individually packaged GMO-tainted crap. Rose needed nutrients; she needed protein. She probably needed fiber. Mary Ellen hesitated in front of the meat case. The shrink-wrapped chicken breasts were grotesquely swollen, like the girls in the awful men’s magazines Matt kept in the bathroom. She chose some ground beef instead, remembering that Rose wanted to learn to make chili.
Why did Sydney and Shelby always have to be so shortsighted? They only thought about what was right in front of their eyes: A game. A screen. A party. Of course it wasn’t all Matt’s fault, it was hers too; she hadn’t tried hard enough to get through to them. And now they were fully formed and leaving home. Completely out of her reach.
Were they going to be okay? Mary Ellen picked up a can of beans and stared at the list of ingredients. She remembered the kids who partied too hard in college. Everybody laughed about the ones who passed out in the quad or threw up all over Frat Court. But nobody talked about the pledge who ended up in the emergency room with alcohol poisoning. No one ever mentioned the girls who stumbled back to their dorms with troubled looks on their faces…who withdrew into themselves, sleeping too much and missing classes. Where were those girls now?
Mary Ellen threw the can into her cart and moved toward the checkout counter. It came down to trust, she supposed. She would just have to have faith that her daughters could take care of themselves…that their expensive education and proper upbringing had prepared them for whatever challenges lay ahead. And, of course, that she and Matt had been good role models. They’d done all right at that, hadn’t they? They were law-abiding, civilized people. She liked her evening cocktails, but it wasn’t like she was blacking out in the middle of the day or creating scenes at parties. She knew when to stop.
She loaded the groceries into the trunk of the car, then took her laptop bag and walked to the edge of the lot to look down the street. A group of old brick buildings was clustered on the next block, like an antique bobbin around which the village was wound. She crossed the street, hands tucked under her armpits. A light snow was falling. She walked briskly toward the brick facades, hoping the library hadn’t been relocated to some flat, sprawling building on a parcel of land that would be hard to find.
But no, it was right there, tucked between Village Hall and a stationery store. Mary Ellen looked in the store window, attracted to a display of leather-bound journals next to the more ordinary spiral-bound notebooks and three-ring binders. The journals looked handmade; she wondered if there was a bookbinder living in the woods nearby, turning deer hides into these pretty, floppy-looking books stamped with floral designs and closed with a loop and a wooden button. She pushed through the brass-trimmed door and asked to see them.
“I don’t know where they’re made.” The teenage shopgirl shrugged as she handed a stack of the books to Mary Ellen. She ran her fingers over the designs, trying to decide which one would be the best addition to her collection. One of them, the simplest, was stamped with a single rose. She smiled at the coincidence and thought about her conversation with the girl the night before. Rose was clearly asking for her help—how could she ignore that? This was her chance, Mary Ellen thought, to make a difference for someone. To throw a little light back into the world for a change, instead of wallowing in the shadows.
“I’ll take this one,” she said, putting it on the counter. She also chose a weighty black pen in a gift box. The girl rang them up, then shoved them briskly into a plastic shopping bag.
It was snowing harder when Mary Ellen got back outside. She entered the library and inquired about Wi-Fi at the front desk, then settled into a worn armchair in a far corner of the high-ceilinged room. She opened up her photo software and began uploading her “accidental” photos to a file server where Justine could view them.
She spent time on her email to Justine, wording it just right, trying not to sound too proud or excited, maintaining a tone of serious contemplation. “I see this as an exploration of postmodernism’s obsession with eradicating agency,” she wrote. “The images are as blurry, ephemeral, and meaningless as any individual’s sense of self.” That sounded good. She pushed Send, savoring the sense of accomplishment, and moved on to her work emails.
Her department seemed to be in a state of chaos. The ad agency was pushing back on
