Read Online Breakdown Lane, The by Jacquelyn Mitchard - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jacquelyn Mitchard
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a disaster.
A year after Cathy lost Saren, Cathy had decided to take a real partner for life. She’d adopted Abby Sun, four months old and an edibly adorable papoosenik, from China. I’d made rum punch with floating sherbet ovals molded with some old Play-Doh forms and stuck with little umbrellas (my Sheboygan interpretation of floating junks), almond cookies, and trail mix of seasoned nuts and crackling noodles. There was plenty of baby passing, and friends of Cathy’s from the rep and the newspaper who’d never met Aurora when she was born brought unexpected gifts for her as well as for Abby. Aury, who was pushing two, kept kissing the sleeping infant and saying, “Baby Abby.” It was fun. Stella Lorenzo announced she’d become engaged, to Tim Downer from the Sunday magazine. I hugged her and said, “Broken hearts…”
“And limp dicks…” Cathy put in.
“All over Sheboygan!” I finished, and she blushed. We all laughed.
“You’ll be a good wife, Stella,” I said.
“I’ve had enough practice!” she said.
“I mean, you’ll be a good wife not because you have big brown eyes and big boobs, which doesn’t hurt, but because you have a big heart and, I know from working in the newsroom, an amazing tolerance to suffer fools with grace and see the good side of anything.”
“That just about describes the perfect person,” Cathy said. “So Stella, I know this isn’t the usual question, but do you have a sister who’s gay?”
We cracked up, and I went to get the cake.
It was when I, returning from the kitchen with the big sheet I’d had made in the shape of a sun, tripped over nothing anyone could see, dropped the plate, and stepped on it that things went jelly-side down.
I knelt in the mess and cried, and try as I might, I couldn’t stop. If I began to laugh, it only released fresh spasms of crying. As if at a signal, women began consoling me with stories of emotional troughs and peaks in their forties and how theirs had been much worse and how nobody needed to eat cake anyhow since we’d had all that trail mix. Stella got down on her knees with the club soda to get the yellow frosting out of the carpet. Only Cathy pulled me aside before she left and suggested I see a doctor. She told me not to worry, that it probably wasn’t anything serious, but that anemia or even a bad inner-ear infection could cause these kinds of wobblies.
It wasn’t until long after that she admitted she’d been covertly watching me walking and dancing for a long while and knew that this was no ear infection.
Whatever the reason, I was in no shape to become a single parent while Leo took a semester off. I was even more dumbstruck when he announced he’d spend part of that time away from home.
“What? Are you kidding?” I asked. “Doing what? Where? For how long? Not a whole week at a time!”
“No, just a month at first, maybe two weeks later on,” Leo said, and I thought, Huh? What did this man just say? It was like the old joke, do you walk or take your lunch to school? “I have the accrued time. I thought one thing I’d do is take a look at land in upstate New York. Perhaps consider buying a plot. Far from, and yet convenient to, the City,” he told me with seductive delight. Privacy, seclusion…and Broadway! Closer to my sister Janey and Pete. Perhaps as a vacation home, maybe more later on in our lives. He’d already planned to meet, along the way, with some of the people he had corresponded with. I could come if I wanted, but, he hurriedly added, he knew I needed to get back to work, and he’d already asked his mother to come down from the cottage, where the elder Steiners now lived permanently, to stay part of the time with us.
“How could you have missed it?” Cathy would later ask. “It was just like Perplexed in Prairieville, or whoever it was, whose husband took bike trips with her sister because they both loved bikes. Julie!”
“It wasn’t like that,” I’d insist, knowing I was
A year after Cathy lost Saren, Cathy had decided to take a real partner for life. She’d adopted Abby Sun, four months old and an edibly adorable papoosenik, from China. I’d made rum punch with floating sherbet ovals molded with some old Play-Doh forms and stuck with little umbrellas (my Sheboygan interpretation of floating junks), almond cookies, and trail mix of seasoned nuts and crackling noodles. There was plenty of baby passing, and friends of Cathy’s from the rep and the newspaper who’d never met Aurora when she was born brought unexpected gifts for her as well as for Abby. Aury, who was pushing two, kept kissing the sleeping infant and saying, “Baby Abby.” It was fun. Stella Lorenzo announced she’d become engaged, to Tim Downer from the Sunday magazine. I hugged her and said, “Broken hearts…”
“And limp dicks…” Cathy put in.
“All over Sheboygan!” I finished, and she blushed. We all laughed.
“You’ll be a good wife, Stella,” I said.
“I’ve had enough practice!” she said.
“I mean, you’ll be a good wife not because you have big brown eyes and big boobs, which doesn’t hurt, but because you have a big heart and, I know from working in the newsroom, an amazing tolerance to suffer fools with grace and see the good side of anything.”
“That just about describes the perfect person,” Cathy said. “So Stella, I know this isn’t the usual question, but do you have a sister who’s gay?”
We cracked up, and I went to get the cake.
It was when I, returning from the kitchen with the big sheet I’d had made in the shape of a sun, tripped over nothing anyone could see, dropped the plate, and stepped on it that things went jelly-side down.
I knelt in the mess and cried, and try as I might, I couldn’t stop. If I began to laugh, it only released fresh spasms of crying. As if at a signal, women began consoling me with stories of emotional troughs and peaks in their forties and how theirs had been much worse and how nobody needed to eat cake anyhow since we’d had all that trail mix. Stella got down on her knees with the club soda to get the yellow frosting out of the carpet. Only Cathy pulled me aside before she left and suggested I see a doctor. She told me not to worry, that it probably wasn’t anything serious, but that anemia or even a bad inner-ear infection could cause these kinds of wobblies.
It wasn’t until long after that she admitted she’d been covertly watching me walking and dancing for a long while and knew that this was no ear infection.
Whatever the reason, I was in no shape to become a single parent while Leo took a semester off. I was even more dumbstruck when he announced he’d spend part of that time away from home.
“What? Are you kidding?” I asked. “Doing what? Where? For how long? Not a whole week at a time!”
“No, just a month at first, maybe two weeks later on,” Leo said, and I thought, Huh? What did this man just say? It was like the old joke, do you walk or take your lunch to school? “I have the accrued time. I thought one thing I’d do is take a look at land in upstate New York. Perhaps consider buying a plot. Far from, and yet convenient to, the City,” he told me with seductive delight. Privacy, seclusion…and Broadway! Closer to my sister Janey and Pete. Perhaps as a vacation home, maybe more later on in our lives. He’d already planned to meet, along the way, with some of the people he had corresponded with. I could come if I wanted, but, he hurriedly added, he knew I needed to get back to work, and he’d already asked his mother to come down from the cottage, where the elder Steiners now lived permanently, to stay part of the time with us.
“How could you have missed it?” Cathy would later ask. “It was just like Perplexed in Prairieville, or whoever it was, whose husband took bike trips with her sister because they both loved bikes. Julie!”
“It wasn’t like that,” I’d insist, knowing I was
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