then realized she couldn’t because it wasn’t taken care of yet. She did add Empty dishwasher to the list, and then crossed it off, because she’d already done that and it made her feel like she had accomplished something.
She sipped her coffee, which was starting to get cold, and tried to plan out her day. There was so much to do, and already she was exhausted. How was it that even as her children got older, it seemed harder to get things done? It was supposed to be the other way around, she was pretty sure of that. But it seemed like the more she tried to get things in order, the more she tried to corral them, the more they squeezed out of her grasp like a group of little greased pigs, determined to do the opposite of whatever she wanted.
WEEZY COFFEY HAD ONCE BEEN Louise Keller. No one called her Weezy until she met Will, when they were freshmen at Lehigh University and were seated next to each other in World Civ class. She’d introduced herself as Louise, but the next day Will called out to her from across the quad, “Hey, Weezy!” It made her laugh, made her heart beat faster to hear him call her that. (Of course, if she’d known it was going to stick, she would have put a stop to it right away.)
They were in college, and everyone was new to everyone else, and this crazy nickname took the place of her real name. Half of her friends from college never even knew her as Louise. With time, even her parents and sisters adopted the name, and eventually she just stopped fighting it. She almost forgot that she’d ever been Louise in the first place.
Even her own children sometimes referred to her as Weezy when talking to each other or to their friends. And a couple of times in high school, when Claire was annoyed, she’d say, “Chill, Weeze,” which made her sound like a frozen treat.
Weezy had graduated from Lehigh with a degree in education, even though she had never really wanted to be a teacher. Her mother had pushed her toward it, telling her that it was a doable profession for women. Weezy took a job in a sixth-grade classroom for one year, and then she’d gotten pregnant with Martha and then Claire, and she never went back.
She hadn’t missed it. After her first week of teaching, she knew she wasn’t going to like it, but she had committed to it, so she gave it a try. The kids she taught were right on the brink of adolescence, that time when they don’t quite fit in their bodies, when they can turn nasty in a second and gang up on each other, on teachers, on anyone, really.
It didn’t make sense for Weezy to work those first few years, not with two babies at home. When both of the girls were in school, she’d started looking into other jobs. “But not teaching,” she told Will. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to go back to work, but she felt like she should. Not for money reasons—they’d actually been quite fortunate, inheriting enough from Will’s father to buy the house, and it wasn’t like they lived an extravagant life. No, it was more that Weezy had always talked about how women had the right to work, how they were equal, and now she felt that she should act on it.
She’d worked on and off for years—at the front desk of a medical office, as the office manager of a small law firm, and most recently at an accounting firm running the day-to-day operations of the office. She’d been there for almost six years, and she couldn’t say she was sorry when they started suggesting they were going to eliminate the position.
The secret she never told anyone—not Will, not Maureen, and certainly not her mother—was that she much preferred the times when she was at home, when she wasn’t working. During those years she was able to make her life more orderly, was able to spend more time with the kids and Will. And even though it had felt chaotic a lot of the time with three kids and a dog, she still loved it.
Her favorite times were Sunday nights, when the house was clean and picked up, the laundry was done, the lunches for school were made and sitting in brown bags in the refrigerator, homework was done, and everyone was asleep.