Read Online Learning to Stay by Erin Celello - Free Book Online

pick up the files I need, and get to court. I shoulder my workbag and an overnight bag. “Can you handle the recycling?” I ask Brad.
    “Sure. At your service,” he says, and I kiss him good-bye.
    “See you Sunday,” I say.
    “See you Sunday.”
    I wonder if Sondra and I will have anything to talk about during the four-hour trip to Minneapolis, but I quickly realize I needn’t have worried. Each of us has a conference call, and for the couple of hours in between we talk about work—about the challenges we’ve faced as career women, the shocking lack of competent bosses and managers in her field and mine, and the merits of our respective fantasy football teams.
    “I’ve never met another woman who does fantasy football,” she says. She’s driving with one hand and twirling a piece of hair above her ear into submission. Outside the car windows, the bright afternoon sun seems to be fading by the second to a crisper, thinner, colder version of itself.
    “It was cheaper and easier to learn than golf,” I tell her. “Goes a long way with the guys in the office—especially the partners.”
    Sondra smiles and wags a finger in my direction. “You’re a cagey one.”
    “That’s not why you do it?”
    Sondra shakes her head. “No, ma’am. I pretty much grew up on the bleachers of the Stick.”
    “The what?”
    “Candlestick Park. In San Fran.”
    “You’re from California?”
    “Born and raised,” Sondra says, and something in her demeanorchanges, as if she’s trying hard to remember something. Or someone. “That was a long time ago. Doesn’t feel like it, but it was.”
    I get Sondra talking about her childhood and her family, mostly so I can avoid talking about my own. I couldn’t have ever wished for better parents, but I’ve learned that something about being an orphan, even an adult orphan, tends to spark awkwardness in any conversation.
    Sondra jumps on her conference call just as we’re crossing through Hudson. I offer to drive, but she waves me off, and something about the fluid way in which she puts her hands-free headset on and connects the call makes me think that she’s an old pro at having to drive and talk all at once. I’m not fluent enough in pharmaceuticalese to follow the conversation, and I let myself drift off into a dreamless, solid sleep.
    When I wake, the sky is black and we’re stopped in front of a behemoth building rising like a giant square moon at the end of a series of parking lots as big as football fields.
    “Sorry I fell asleep,” I say. I rub my eyes and shake my head as if to rattle loose the last remnants of sleep. “We’re here?”
    Sondra doesn’t answer me. She’s clutching the steering wheel and her forehead is pressed against it.
    “Sondra?”
    After a good long while, she speaks without lifting her head. “I don’t think I can do this,” she says.
    I have no idea what she’s talking about. Do what? We’ve come all this way to visit her husband. This isn’t the first time she’s seen him since he’s been stateside. I don’t see what the issue is. Darcy told me Sondra’s family lived on the West Coast and she was tired of driving all this way by herself every weekend; she hadn’t told me she was a flight risk.
    “You mean you can’t do it now?”
    Sondra straightens up. She slaps her hands lightly against either side of her face and then runs them through her hair. She inhales and then exhales audibly. Then she shakes her head.
    “I’m probably just tired. Let’s check in. I’ll come back in the morning.”
    “Okay,” I say. “But isn’t Antony expecting you?”
    “I’ll call and tell him we got a late start out of Madison.” Sondra turns the key and the car’s engine jumps to life, spitting warm air out the vents at us. I don’t know how long we were stopped before I woke, and I don’t realize until the heat hits me how chilled I am.
    I just shrug, because what else am I supposed to do? My role here is clearly defined: