shower that I have to use the bathroom somewhere else in the house?”
“Exactly,” Max said. He sat back and looked pleased.
“Maybe I just won’t use anything if anyone’s in the shower. Does that work?”
“You could do that too,” Claire said. She smiled at her and reached across the table to pat Cleo on the arm. She couldn’t believe that her brother was asking his girlfriend to interrupt showers at his family’s house. How stupid could boys be?
AT THE END OF MARCH, Amanda decided not to come back to Proof Perfect. Claire wasn’t surprised one bit. As soon as Amanda had taken the extra three months, Claire could have guessed that she’d never be back. Who could blame her? The thought of returning from maternity leave to face crazy Leslie and all of the strange people here was pretty horrible. Leslie called Claire into her office to tell her the situation.
“What’s unfortunate is that we’ve paid for her health care for the past three months. We believed her when she said she was coming back,” Leslie said.
“I’m sure a lot of people change their minds once they’re home with the baby,” Claire said. But Leslie shook her head.
“The good news is that we’ve discussed it and we’ve decided to offer you the job full time.”
“Oh, Leslie, that’s so nice, but I can’t take it.”
Leslie wrinkled her eyebrows and tilted her head, like she couldn’t possibly understand what Claire was saying.
“It’s just … I don’t plan to stay here long term.”
“Well, we all know that the best-laid plans always blow up in your face.”
Was that a saying? Claire really didn’t think so.
“I think I’m pretty set on moving back to New York,” Claire said. “But thank you for the offer and for the opportunity.”
“Why don’t you sit with it for a while? We’re not in any rush to find someone new. You can keep the job as a temporary situation and think about it for a month or two.”
Claire agreed, but her heart was pounding when she left her office. She felt like there was a chance she’d just end up trapped there. She tried to talk herself down, tell herself that it was a ridiculous thing to think. But she still felt a slight panic and she knew that sooner rather than later, she’d have to get out of there. June, she decided, was her limit.
LAINIE AND CLEO HAD TAKEN TO going for long walks together after dinner. “You should come,” Lainie said, but Claire declined. She watched from her window as the two pregnant ladies walked down the sidewalk, their heads turned toward each other, Cleo laughing at something that Lainie said, while she gestured and shook her head. Lainie had invited Cleo over for lunch one day, and ever since then the two of them had been spending a lot of time together.
“She just needs someone to talk to,” Lainie said. “She’s scared out of her mind, and there’s no one she can really ask about this stuff.”
“That’s nice of you,” Claire said. She didn’t really mean it.
The first time Cleo and Lainie had met, a couple of years ago now, they seemed to like each other immediately. They’d smiled at each other right away, and spent the night talking, bonding over (Claire could only assume) both being really, really pretty. And now, here they were, waddling off into the sunset together, talking about pregnancy and hormones and placentas. It reminded Claire of seeing Lainie talk to Margie Schuller in the bathroom that day, knowing that she was on the other side of something and that there was nothing she could do to join them. It felt a little lonely.
Her friend Katherine was calling her more often, asking her when she was coming back to New York. “I don’t think you should stay there any longer,” she said. “You really need to come back.”
When Claire thought about going back to New York, she felt calm. Was it wrong that part of it was because she knew that there were so many other women there her age who had jobs and were unattached and weren’t even close to having babies? Was it such a bad thing to want to be surrounded by your own kind? People had been doing it for years, really. Look at the ethnic neighborhoods that popped up all over. There were Little Italys and Chinatowns in every city. And weren’t there even midget colonies somewhere? She’d heard that once and it made so much sense to