hit puberty and hormones crawled all over their tiny apartment. They pitied the family and what was in store for them.
Now Claire realized the family was probably pitying her—that is, if they’d even noticed that Doug had moved out. Either way, they seemed to be getting a lot more annoying.
WHEN DOUG AND CLAIRE CALLED OFF their engagement, her friend Katherine had said, “In some ways, it’s worse than a divorce.” It was Claire’s first night out since the whole thing happened, and she and Katherine were at a wine bar near her apartment. “I guess it’s because it ended before it even started, so it’s like someone dying young.”
“Great,” Claire said.
Katherine wasn’t listening. “Or maybe it’s because by the time people get divorced, they’re usually like really sick of each other, and have done bad things and are ready to move on. With you guys, no one saw this coming.”
Claire figured this had to be the strangest response she would get. Katherine, a friend from high school, was so perpetually messed up that you got used to it after a while. Her first week in New York, she’d watched a thirty-two-year-old woman leap off the subway platform at Twenty-third and Park, killing herself as she got hit by the number 6 train. Katherine had skipped work for two weeks, leaving her apartment only to purchase a small white Maltese for eight hundred dollars from the pet store on the corner with her parents’ credit card. Things since then had been touch and go. Claire could forgive her strange reply. Surely everyone else would know how to be more appropriate.
But Claire was wrong. Apparently no one knew how to react to her news. Her two friends at work, Becca and Molly, decided that their mission would be to cheer Claire up by telling her all of the bizarre love stories they knew. Sometimes the point was clear (“My mom was engaged before she met my dad, you know!”) and sometimes it wasn’t, like the time Molly told her about her sister who worked as a nanny and ended up running off and marrying the father of her babysitting charges, leaving his first wife in their dust. “Isn’t that romantic?” Molly asked. No, Claire wanted to say, that’s not romantic, it’s adultery. But she stayed silent and smiled.
Becca and Molly had been nice coworkers to have. They were all around the same age, all enjoyed getting an occasional drink after work to complain about the office, and were happy to have lunch together. She had always liked them. Until now. One afternoon in her office, as Molly told her about all of the friends she had who were getting divorced, Claire said, “Well, at least I won’t have to be Claire Winklepleck. Now there’s a silver lining.”
Molly stared at her for a moment, and then said quietly, like she didn’t want to upset Claire, “So many women don’t take their husband’s name anymore. You wouldn’t have had to do that if it made you uncomfortable.”
“Right,” Claire answered. “Right.”
She’d decided that day that Becca and Molly had to go. It was really for the best. She began to avoid them. Whenever she saw them coming toward her office around lunchtime, she’d pick up the phone and call her voice mail, so that when they popped their heads in, she could roll her eyes and point to the phone, then wave them along, as if to say, “Don’t wait for me, this could take forever, just go, go on!”
MADDIE AND JACK WERE NOW screeching and laughing in the hallway, the kind of laughing that often turned into hysterical crying, when one kid hit another and the game quickly went south. She waited for that to happen, but they quieted a little bit and resumed their game, some sort of crummy hallway soccer, she assumed. She hoped that they’d be out of there by the time she wanted to order dinner, because she didn’t want to have to wave to them and say hello, have to pet the dog and smile as she accepted her food.
She probably shouldn’t even be ordering out, considering her money situation, but what difference did twenty more dollars on her credit card really make at this point? The credit card balance was so high, so unbelievable, that she was able to ignore it most of the time, to pretend that there was no way she’d spent that much in the past six months. It just wasn’t possible.