“Why would I blame you?” Maribeth asked.
Her mother looked away. Then she clapped her hands together, as if officially ending the discussion. “What would you like for dinner? I thought we might get that brisket from the Jewish deli.”
“Brisket is kind of fatty,” Maribeth said.
Her mother put her hands on her hips. “At my age, I’m done counting calories.”
“I meant me. I’m supposed to eat lean meats.”
“Oh, we can get you a nice barley soup. Or a turkey sandwich. Do you have a menu?”
“No. We order online.”
“I don’t do computers.”
“Why don’t you tell me exactly what you want and I’ll take care of it.”
“Perfect.”
JASON WAS WORKING late so Maribeth put both kids to bed that night. Oscar had already fallen asleep and Maribeth was finishing Liv’s last book when out of nowhere her daughter asked, “If you die, will Grandma be our mommy?”
Maribeth was shaken. She had thought they’d successfully masked the gravity of what was going on. Mommy was sick but the doctors were making her better, that kind of thing. It was the first time the d-word had come up.
“I’m not going to die for a very long time, sweetie,” she said.
“If you die, can Robbie be our mommy?”
“It doesn’t work like that. And I’m not going to die.”
Oscar roused. “I don’t want you to die,” he pleaded sleepily.
“I’m not going to die,” she said. Yet, she thought. Please don’t let me die yet. “Go night-night, sweetie.”
A minute later, she heard Oscar’s snores. Liv was wide awake, blinking those huge eyes of hers, twirling a seam on her night gown. “If you die, tell Daddy to marry someone nice. I don’t want a mean stepmommy, like Cinderella.”
A tight feeling seized her chest, though Maribeth knew from previous conversations with Liv it wasn’t her heart, just her daughter’s uncanny ability to hit the tender spots. Because she had been thinking about this every day since she’d woken up from her bypass. What would happen to the twins if something happened to her?
She snapped off the light. “Go to sleep,” she said.
9
Now that Jason was back in the office, he was working longer hours than ever. He blamed the database upgrade, but Maribeth suspected he was looking for reasons to stay out of the loft. If she could do the same, she would.
The place was a disaster. Her mother was not much of a housekeeper, and cleaning had never been Robbie’s thing, so the mountains of laundry grew by the day, which was unpleasant, but it was the dirty dishes in the sink with the potential to draw out every cockroach within a five-block vicinity that worried Maribeth.
So, she started doing dishes. And laundry. And because she could not face another meal of takeout, she began to cook simple meals. These small tasks robbed her of whatever energy she was regaining. When he got home from work, Jason scolded her for doing too much, and yet he continued working late.
One morning during her second week home, Maribeth went to the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee and found some of last night’s dinner dishes, along with all of the morning’s breakfast mess. As if waiting for her.
Screw this, she thought. Going to the office would be easier than this. Remembering the promise she’d made to Elizabeth the week before—a promise she had half forgotten about as Elizabeth had urged her to—she fired up her laptop. As she waited for her work e-mail to download, dread knotted her stomach.
She recognized this as re-entry anxiety. Two summers ago, right after Maribeth had gone back to work at Frap, Elizabeth had invited her and the family up to Tom’s place in the Berkshires (well, now it was her and Tom’s place) for a long weekend. At the last minute Elizabeth had said she and Tom couldn’t come, but she’d implored Maribeth to go with Jason and the kids. They’d expected something rustic but instead had found an enormous colonial house with a private pond. The only thing rustic about it was that it was remote, and intentionally dewired. No cable TV. No Internet. Just a landline. You had to drive into Lenox to get cell reception. But it had been nice. Maribeth had turned off her phone, spending carefree hours hunting four-leaf clovers and observing tadpoles with the twins. But on the drive home, her phone had started chiming with e-mails and texts, making her feel like she’d missed something essential and was about to pay a price for it. Which was exactly how she felt now.
But no, there was nothing essential. In fact, there was hardly any mail at all. Which was odd. In any given day, between the staff-wide production notices and meeting announcements, and back and forth between her and various editors and writers, she usually had at least a hundred new messages. She looked through the inbox and saw that it cut off, abruptly, a few weeks ago, right around the time of her surgery. And several messages that had come in before the e-mail had been cut off had been read. But not by her.
She switched over to the webmail version in case it was a computer malfunction but it was the same thing. She checked her personal account to see if her e-mail was behaving wonky but it was fine. Weird. She called Elizabeth’s assistant, Finoula.
“Finoula, hi, it’s Maribeth Klein.”
“Maribeth, hi! How are you feeling?”
“I’m great. Well, not great, but better. All things considered.”
“Good, good. Tricky business, the heart,” Finoula said. “My granny had bypass surgery. She’s back hauling wheelbarrows through her garden now.”