Breakdown Lane, The by Jacquelyn Mitchard Read Free Book Online Page A

for. You could have the same effect with vitamin C and petroleum jelly, Julie.”
    “When did you become a cosmetician?”
    “It’s globally gratuitous, to spend thirty-five bucks on something your skin can’t even really absorb.”
    “Well, it’s locally ludicrous to complain about such a dumb thing. Why don’t you get a bicycle instead of driving the Volvo, Leo?”
    “I would, but I can’t get to work fast enough in rush-hour traffic.”
    “Rush hour lasts about five minutes here, Leo….”
    We let the matter drop. And I began buying Yonka—even more expensive than Clarins, and yes, packaged with the salty joy of passive aggressiveness.
    Then one day, Leo told me, “I’ve been thinking that I may take early retirement at fifty-two, because I know there are going to be cutbacks. What I hear is that everybody who’ll do it voluntarily is going to get the full benefits package and pension, plus some salary. I thought, we’ll sell this place. Maybe get a cabin. Just a one-room cabin. Maybe up near Wild Rose or someplace nice, when the kids are off to college.”
    “Have a ball,” I told him, “and visit often. I’m not living in a one-room cabin, Leo.” I didn’t bother to look up from sewing patches on Caro’s jeans—for decoration, I might add, not to cover holes. “I have enough trouble with the spiderwebs in the bedroom rafters in Door County.”
    “Or upstate New York,” he went on, ignoring what I’d said. “I’m thinking of going there, just for a photography weekend. I’ve met some people online up there who are doing some amazing things with small-space gardening.”
    “More fertile tubs? Tomato prayers?” I asked.
    “No, smart ass. I mean, they’ve turned their yards, if you want to call them that, into a combination of prairie and garden. It’s gorgeous.”
    “Show me a picture.”
    “I…I don’t have one,” Leo said.
    “Then how do you know they’re gorgeous?”
    “I…read about them.”
    “Leo, Caroline isn’t even in high school yet.”
    “But she will be soon.”
    “We’re talking five years or more from now, Leo.”
    “But we could buy the land—”
    “ Leo! What about my job?”
    “You could retire, too.”
    “And the kids? Do you expect them to put themselves through school and sleep on the earthen floor during summer vacations?”
    “I put myself through school; and your dad left them trust funds so they could take out loans and pay them back later.”
    “That’s true, but they expected to see that,” I told Leo, my eyes smarting with tears.
    He relented. “Forget about it for now. I’m sorry, Jules.”
    My parents had died the summer before last.
    Though they’d rarely come to see us, we’d gone to New York every year to see them. They weren’t a presence in our daily lives, as the Steiners were. But when they died in a plane crash in Scotland, guest of some laird, the effect on me was devastating. In a foolish homage, I reduced the space in our bedroom by a third to install my father’s mahogany desk, with photos cemented by time under its glass top. Photos of him as a young man, laughing with E. B. White and Truman Capote, neither my father nor any of the others absent a cocktail glass. Leo bored a hole in the back for my computer cords, and I worked there, surrounded by the tweedy presence of my father’s loving, offhand protection. I had my sister, Janey, but she was in the mold of Mother and Father—she and her architect husband giving “little parties” for fifty, hanging around the Hamptons with sons and daughters of famous writers with names like Bo and Razzie.
    My only real world was Leo and the kids. I wasn’t going to have it pulled out from under me like a worn-out rug on a whim.
    “I’m not ready to be retired, Leo,” I told him severely. “I’m not ready to become your parents. And I won’t be in five years. I’m a medium-density housing person. I need human friends, not just cybers.”
    “You could telecommute. They