her nose start to run and knew she’d be crying soon. Lainie patted her knee, got up, turned on the bedroom light, and went into the kitchen. She came back with Kleenex and two beers. She handed one to Claire and sat cross-legged in front of her.
“I’m so screwed,” Claire said.
Lainie nodded. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. “It seems impossible, I know, but it’s not. We’ll figure it out.”
There were times in college when the size of a paper she had to write would overwhelm Claire. She’d sit there in front of the computer and try to get herself to start typing, but all she could think about was how much she had to do, the enormousness of the project. It would paralyze her. People sometimes said that fear was a motivator, but she never found that. Instead, she’d sit, all night, staring at the screen and not typing a word.
And it was happening again. The amount of her debt was too big, the size of her fuckup was too large. To act on it would be to acknowledge it, to start trying to fix it, and it just didn’t seem like there was any way to do that. And so she sat, paralyzed, and waited.
The next day, Lainie left and Claire sat on her couch. She was exhausted. She and Lainie had stayed up almost the whole night talking, and right around five in the morning, Lainie had said, “Look, don’t freak out, okay? But maybe you should think about moving home.”
“Lainie. I’m not moving home. That’s ridiculous.”
“Okay, that’s what I thought you’d say. But listen, people do it all the time to pay off debt. You don’t even like your job, and it would be an excuse to leave it. You could live rent free, get a random job, pay off all your credit cards, and then move back when you’re more settled. You could take your time looking for a job and find one that you really want.”
Claire was annoyed at how rational Lainie sounded. She wanted to offer up another plan, another idea for how she could get herself out of her situation, but she didn’t have one. From her calculations, after next month, she was done.
“You could even temp,” Lainie continued. “So it wouldn’t even be like you were staying there. Temping is just that. Temping. Temporary. Beth used an agency that loved her, that’s always e-mailing her for referrals. They’d die to get you. I think most of the people that go there are sort of weird or something, but whatever. It would be easy. It would be like a break, and you deserve a break after this year, you really do.”
When she’d left today, Lainie had said, “Think about what we talked about. I think it’s the best plan.”
Claire had hugged her and closed the door, thinking there was no way in hell that was going to happen. But now here she was, alone in her apartment, and she felt trapped again, but this time it wasn’t because the Hamburger Helpers were outside—it was because she had no money. None. This was it. Lainie was right. She couldn’t stay, and her only option was to move home.
Last night Lainie had said, “Look at it this way—at least you have this option. At least going home is a possibility.” Claire knew she should feel grateful for that, even if she didn’t right now. She’d tell her parents at the shore, she decided. How bad could it be? It couldn’t be worse than telling them her engagement was called off, could it?
And so, knowing that she couldn’t get out of it, knowing that she had no better alternative anyway, Claire pulled her bag out of the closet and began putting together her clothes for a week at the shore with her family.
The woman that Katherine saw jump in front of the subway was named Joanne Jansen. It was a cute name—catchy and poetic, sort of like Claire Coffey. There were a few people on the subway platform that day that insisted Joanne Jansen had just fallen, that the whole thing was a horrible accident. But Katherine told Claire that wasn’t true. “She jumped with her arms in front of her,” Katherine said. “She jumped like a superhero, like she wanted to make sure she got to where she was going.” Claire thought of that now as she packed, how Joanne Jansen had put her arms straight in front of her, determined and sure of