could tell she wanted to talk about it. Finally she said, “I’m thinking about going back to nursing.”
“Really?” Claire asked. “Wow.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Martha asked.
“Nothing, just—wow. I haven’t heard you talk about nursing in a long time.”
“Well, I’ve just been thinking about it lately. I think it’s time. But not in a hospital. Maybe at a doctor’s office or something.”
“I think that’s great,” Claire said. “Really, I do. You always wanted to be a nurse and you were good at it.”
Martha looked over at Claire. “Thank you,” she said, and then she started writing again.
Claire considered telling Martha everything. Confessing about the apartment and the credit cards and all of it. But she knew that if she did, Martha would let her mouth fall wide open, stare at her, and then go tell Weezy. She wouldn’t be able to stop herself. Martha told Weezy everything, which was weird. It should have been the other way around, her loyalty to Claire, but it never had been and it wasn’t going to start now. So Claire kept her mouth shut.
She wished that she could tell Doug about everything. It didn’t make sense, of course, because if she and Doug were still together and he was there to talk to, she wouldn’t be in this situation. It had helped a little to tell Lainie, but it wasn’t the same. She missed having one person to give her undivided attention and advice, to be almost as responsible for her actions as she was.
Probably it was just loneliness that made her wish for Doug. That was normal, right? It was a shitty situation and she just wanted help, that’s all. She sighed and rolled over on her stomach so she wouldn’t have to watch Max and Cleo anymore. It was dumb, but it made her feel worse to watch them being happy. And she found she couldn’t stop watching them, even though it made her feel horrible. It was like when you had a cut on your lip that you kept biting at—it hurt, but you couldn’t leave it alone.
Now Doug and her money problems were all in a mix in her head. She shouldn’t have started thinking about it. Lately, she tried to remember only the really annoying things about him. The way he read only nonfiction books on truly boring subjects. How when he slept he let his limbs fly everywhere, and how she was never really comfortable when she was in bed with him; how she remained still and rigid, right on the edge of sleep, tucked in the corner of the bed.
But then she remembered other things, like how he always unpacked her laundry when it was delivered, and stacked her mail on the desk. Or she remembered the time they were at a bar, drinking beer in the afternoon, watching a baseball game. The bar was pretty empty, just a few people watching the game, and one single guy on a stool at the end of the bar, wearing a knit hat and frowning at his beer and then at the TV. And Doug had leaned over and said, “Hipsters are so joyless,” and Claire had been so surprised that she’d spit her beer on the bar.
The thing was that it didn’t really matter what she thought about when she remembered Doug. Because the truth was that she would have married him if he hadn’t ended it. And that was the scariest thing of all. Because it meant either that she was stupid enough to commit to someone who wasn’t really right for her or that she did love him and he left her and broke her heart. And honestly, sometimes she wasn’t sure which one it was.
ON THURSDAY, CLEO ASKED CLAIRE if she wanted to go shopping on the boardwalk with her. The shops down there were full of animals made out of seashells and T-shirts that said things like AA IS WHERE I GO TO MEET DRUNK SLUTS, and REHAB IS FOR QUITTERS. But Cleo looked eager and so Claire agreed. Who knew? Maybe Cleo would find a beach cover-up that she liked.
They walked in and out of the little shops, quietly browsing through the ashtrays and postcards. Every once in a while, Cleo would hold up a T-shirt for Claire to read, and they’d both laugh.
Claire turned to examine a shelf of glass pipes, as though she were really looking to buy one. She picked up a red and brown swirled pipe, looked at it